[nice tight copy, very light shelfwear, one-time owner's address label on ffep; jacket slightly age-toned, a trace of wear along top edge, two-inch wrinkle/pucker along top rear hinge, minor soiling to rear panel]. Erotic take-off on Voltaire's Candide -- generally thought of as an artifact of the 1960s, although it was first published in France (as by "Maxwell Kenton") in 1958 -- here making its first legit (i.e., non-smuggled) appearance in the U.S., this also being the first hardcover issue, ditto the first with the authors' real names acknowledged. The book has (thankfully) outli... View More...
(pictorial boards; no dust jacket) [good solid book, moderate shelfwear, faint soiling to top edge]. The author's first full-length published book, which he claims, title notwithstanding, "has no connection with geology. None. Note that the titleword is a compound with equal stress on both constituents. It would, therefore, be an error to place more emphasis on, say, BED than on ROCK. Or vice versa." (The book's three sections -- "birth," "copulation" and " death" -- derive from a T.S. Eliot quotation.) View More...
[slight fading at top of boards; jacket rubbed/soiled, spine a bit sun-faded, wrinkled & dog-eared at top of spine]. "The subject is Quill: lunatic, hypochondriac, kept man, rapist, murderer, and the author of several scholarly works including a text on the pathology of an undiscovered snow creature and the extensive history of moon warfare entitled 'Past Particles.' Or, he is perhaps sane, ravaged by disease, passionate, an innocent victim, a genius of prescience." [And, I might add, the subject of a fabulous jacket illustration! (scan available upon request)]. View More...
[nice tight clean copy, no discernible wear; jacket has a tiny bit of wrinkling along the top edge]. INSCRIBED boldly ("______ / Hearting you!") and SIGNED by the author on the half-title page, and addtionally SIGNED on the title page, with a line drawn through her printed name. Debut novel, in which the protagonist, Kate (hmmm) "makes the unlikely migration from suburban California to the chilly rigor of a New England prep school, and then to Manhattan. Here she will enjoy a dissipated life of bartending and writing novels, falling in love with the wrong boys, and discussing the... View More...
[very presentable book, with light shelfwear and faint soiling to bottom edge, slight bumping to bottom corners, minor dust-soiling to top edge; jacket shows a bit of wear at corners, small closed tear at top of front panel]. The playwright and (more recently) thriller writer's scarce first novel, "the story of Charlie Minor, of what he is and what he wants to be and of how he manages to become almost a hero. Charlie is a dreamer, a lover, a veteran, an ex-Communist, a diligent men' s room entrepreneur-employee of the New York City Parks Department, a faithful fan of the late late movie,... View More...
[solid copy with minor shelfwear; jacket soiled, edgeworn, bottom 2-1/2" of spine missing]. Novel about an alcoholic lawyer who returns to his hometown in North Florida, where he gets involved in defending the daughter of a former family servant against a charge that she murdered a prominent local (white) citizen. "Once he becomes convinced of her innocence, he faces the crucial problem--how he, almost as hated by the community as [the woman], can secure her a fair trial and acquittal." View More...
[nice clean copy, very light shelfwear, shallow dent at top of rear cover; jacket is clean and attractive despite one short and slightly ragged closed tear at bottom of front panel and another at top of rear panel]. My God, did any writer ever want to be Hemingway as badly (and baldly) as Peter Viertel? His 1992 memoir, "Dangerous Friends: At Large with Hemingway and Huston in the Fifties," while a fascinating read, is also more than occasionally a little sickening for the degree of sycophancy it displays towards "Papa." Anyway, it's not surprising that he waited until the ol... View More...
[ex-library, minimally marked as such (just a "discard" stamp on the rear fep) but with other traces, notably large glue stains on both pastedowns (and bleeding through both jacket flaps), the single letter "F" on the ffep, and a tiny scar on the rear fep (from removal of some sort of label, I presume); the jacket itself, aside from the aforementioned glue stains, is quite presentable, with just some minor soiling, one small tear at top of rear panel, one tiny tear at top of front panel]. "The intensely human story of [this book] takes place in Richmond Hill, Queens, New York, during a four-mo... View More...
[corners bumped, otherwise nice and clean, except for a gray stain of undetermined origin along the rear gutter (interior binding); jacket somewhat rubbed, mild wear/wrinkling along top edge, 1/2" tear at top right edge of front panel, a couple of diagonal creases in front flap]. Uncommon British edition of the author's highly-regarded first novel, SIGNED and dated (July 31, 1987) by the author on the title page, with an additional authorial inscription and first-name signature. Signed by Author View More...
(price-clipped, although price remains visible) [good sound copy, moderate shelfwear to bottom edge; jacket shows some wear at spine ends, one-inch diagonal closed tear at top left corner of front panel, with associated wrinkling/creasing across top edge of front panel, also small closed tears at both top corners of rear panel]. Scarce novel set on the campus of the fictional "Lincoln College, purveyor of education to the vast multitudes of New York City's youth, the people with the unpronounceable names and the flat pocketbooks, who flow in daily by subway." The story, a tract again... View More...
[very slight wear to base of spine, faint soiling to top of text block; jacket slightly browned at spine, minor scuffing to rear panel]. INSCRIBED and SIGNED by the author on the ffep: "For Sally & Chris / Affectionately, / Eric / October 1966." Novel about a strange sort of romantic triangle, involving a British television personality, a "wealthy but unstable" young poet, and the latter's fiancee. When the TV guy (an acerbic panel member on a show called the "Television Brains Trust") gets to messing around with the fiancee, a practice known as Candaulism comes into ... View More...
[nice clean copy, minor wear to base of spine; jacket slightly age-toned at spine, no other significant wear]. Novel about "the twenty-four hours in the life of a young man just before he goes into military service," even though he's passionately against war and does intend to do any killing: "he wants only to look in the face of the man who will try to kill him, and love that man if he can." Basis for the 1970 film of the same name, directed by David Miller and starring a young Michael Douglas in his first starring role, with Arthur Kennedy and Teresa Wright as his uncompreh... View More...
(price-clipped) [nice clean copy, with light shelfwear; jacket slightly wrinkled at top of front panel, very minor dog-earing at top of spine]. A bit of Sixties-ness, "a satire and very funny in parts, but also a tragedy." Per the jacket blurb, it's "the story of a girl's round trip to the dentist's office" -- but actually there seems to be quite a lot more to it. The action wanders episodically all over California, North and South, involving "cabbies, truck drivers and hub-cap collectors," and "each step of [the heroine's] journey is parallel with some other, [an... View More...
[moderate soiling and light dampstain to top edge of text block (interior of book unaffected), white patch (probably from sticker removal) on ffep, otherwise just lightly shelfworn; jacket slightly tanned at spine, tiny stain at bottom right corner of front panel]. The first of only two published novels by this Kansas-born author (1930-2008), a ribald satire that became a small-scale literary cause clbre after an excerpt published in The Paris Review in 1967 ignited a somewhat bizarre censorship attempt in the Long Island town of South Farmingdale, N.Y.; in the course of the kerfuffle, TPR ed... View More...
[book mildly shelfworn, a bit of soiling to edges, spine turned; jacket a little dog-eared/edgeworn, with a rather clumsily tape-repaired tear at bottom of front panel]. What is UNIAD (Universal Advisors, Inc.)? A "personal advisory guild" with limited membership, that promises it can and will change your life -- if you can meet the entrance requirements. (Imagine that -- a novel based on the idea that computers might play an important role in human social interactions. What a silly notion, eh?) View More...
[beautiful book, clean and unmarked, no discernible wear to either book or jacket]. "A modern coming-of-age novel about a boy's struggle for survival in a lush and corrupting world," in which a 15-year-old boy is abruptly transplanted from the mean streets of New York's Lower East Side to an exclusive rural New Jersey community, thanks to his cocaine-addicted masseuse mother's hooking up with one of her clients, an aging billionaire. View More...
[nice tight clean book with no discernible wear; jacket a little rubbed, one small closed tear at bottom of rear panel]. The author's first novel, set in the bayou country of Louisiana, featuring police detective Rene Shade. View More...
Near Fine in Near Fine dj [nice tight copy, faint yellowing of page edges, small dented spot on fore-edge; jacket has one small tear at upper front corner, mild chipping at spine ends]. "When [the author] was editor for a well-known television series, 'The Defenders,' he found it impossible to win approval for a script that embodied the central thesis of a Supreme Court decision. 'Far too controversial' was the network's verdict. Ths persuaded [the author] that more should be known about the operations of our highest tribunal and how its decisions are arrived at." This spurred him on t... View More...