Harriet Doerr

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

Georgia

Winner of the National Book Award for First Work of Fiction "A very good novel indeed, with echoes of Gabriel García Márquez, Katherine Anne Porter, and even Graham Greene."--The New York Times Richard and Sara Everton, just over and just under forty, have come to the small Mexican village of Ibarra to reopen a copper mine abandoned by Richard’s grandfather fifty years before. They have mortgaged, sold, borrowed, left friends and country, to settle in this remote spot; their plan is to live out their lives here, connected to the place and to each other. The two Americans, the only foreigners in Ibarra, live among people who both respect and misunderstand them. And gradually the villagers--at first enigmas to the Evertons--come to teach them much about life and the relentless tide of fate.

Stones for Ibarra

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Thomas Hardy

Decirculated library copy With library stamps, and call number tag on spine. Pages are in very good condition, no marks or highlights.

Jude Fawley's ambitions to go to university are thwarted by class prejudice and his entrapment in a loveless marriage. His doomed love affair with his unconventional cousin has tragic consequences. Hardy's last, and most controversial novel, this revised edition has the first truly critical text, a new chronology and bibliography, and substantially revised notes.

Jude the Obscure

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Patricia Highsmith

Slight bubbling around the corners from the public library protective covering. Other than the bubbling, and none of it is peeling. Pages are free of marks or highlights.

Patricia Highsmith's story of sexual obsession is a major motion picture release for fall 2015. In Carol, two women from different backgrounds--one a department store clerk who dreams of a better life, one who is wealthy and married -- strike up a love affair with each other in 1950s New York. Cate Blanchett, star of such films as The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, plays the titular housewife, Carol, while Rooney Mara of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is Therese, who immediately falls for the striking older woman. With a story based on Highsmith's 1952 novel -- originally titled The Price of Salt, which she published under the pseudonym Claire Morgan -- Carol is directed by acclaimed filmmaker Todd Haynes (director of I'm Not There, Far from Heaven, which was nominated for four Oscars, and Velvet Goldmine) and written by Phyllis Nagy (currently writing the screenplay for Kate Atkinson's Case Histories).

Carol

4aacbd88-ec19-468c-b484-5c6278a6f837

James Baldwin

Pages are in excellent condition even though there is a slight tear in the bottom left front cover, and the top right back cover. No marks or highlights on inner pages.

Eight people become entangled in a web of interpersonal relationships, doomed to become as savage and destructive as the society which oppresses them

Another Country

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Charlotte Bronte

Orphaned Jane Eyre grows up in the home of her heartless aunt, where she endures loneliness and cruelty, and at a charity school with a harsh regime. This troubled childhood strengthens Jane's natural independence and spirit - which prove necessary when she finds a position as governess at Thornfield Hall. But when she finds love with her sardonic employer, Rochester, the discovery of his terrible secret forces her to make a choice. Should she stay with him and live with the consequences, or follow her convictions, even if it means leaving the man she loves? A novel of intense power and intrigue, Jane Eyre (1847) dazzled and shocked readers with its passionate depiction of a woman's search for equality and freedom.

Jane Eyre

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Jaime Clarke

Signed by the author.
Sharpie marking on top binding—see photo—but pages are all super clean

Fiction. Charlie Martens is desperate for stability in an otherwise peripatetic life. An explosion that killed his parents when he was young robbed him of normalcy and he was shuttled from relative to relative, left alone to decipher the world he encountered in order to cobble together an answer as to how he would live. Ever the outcast, Charlie recognizes in Olivia, an international student from London, the sense of otherness he feels and their relationship seems to promise salvation. But when Olivia abandons him, his desperate mind fixates on her favorite writer, Vernon Downs, who becomes an emblem for reunion with Olivia. Charlie's quest takes him from Phoenix to New York City and when chance brings him into proximity to Vernon Downs, he quickly ingratiates himself into Downs's world. Proximity invites certain temptations, though, and it isn't long before Charlie moves dangerously from fandom to apprentice to outright possession.

"VERNON DOWNS is a gripping, hypnotically written and unnerving look at the dark side of literary adulation. Jaime Clarke's tautly suspenseful novel is a cautionary tale for writers and readers alike—after finishing it, you may start to think that J.D. Salinger had the right idea after all."—Tom Perrotta

"Moving and edgy in just the right way. Love (or lack of) and Family (or lack of) is at the heart of this wonderfully obsessive novel."—Gary Shteyngart

"All strong literature stems from obsession. VERNON DOWNS belongs to a tradition that includes Nicholson Baker's U and I, Geoff Dyer's Out of Sheer Rage, and—for that matter—Pale Fire. What makes Clarke's excellent novel stand out isn't just its rueful intelligence, or its playful semi-veiling of certain notorious literary figures, but its startling sadness. VERNON DOWNS is first rate."—Matthew Specktor

"Jaime Clarke's VERNON DOWNS is a brilliant meditation on obsession, art, and celebrity. Charlie Marten's mounting fixation with the titular Vernon is not only driven by the burn of heartbreak and the lure of fame, but also a lost young man's struggle to locate his place in the world. VERNON DOWNS is an intoxicating novel, and Clarke is a dazzling literary talent."—Laura van den Berg

"An engrossing novel about longing and impersonation, which is to say, a story about the distance between persons, distances within ourselves. Clarke's prose is infused with music and intelligence and deep feeling."—Charles Yu

"VERNON DOWNS is a fascinating and sly tribute to a certain fascinating and sly writer, but this novel also perfectly captures the lonely distortions of a true obsession."—Dana Spiotta

Vernon Downs

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James Joyce

Seamus Deane

James Joyce's coming-of-age story, a tour de force of style and technique The first, shortest, and most approachable of James Joyce’s novels, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man portrays the Dublin upbringing of Stephen Dedalus, from his youthful days at Clongowes Wood College to his radical questioning of all convention. In doing so, it provides an oblique self-portrait of the young Joyce himself. At its center lie questions of origin and source, authority and authorship, and the relationship of an artist to his family, culture, and race. Exuberantly inventive in style, the novel subtly and beautifully orchestrates the patterns of quotation and repetition instrumental in its hero’s quest to create his own character, his own language, life, and art: “to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.” This Penguin Classics edition is the definitive text, authorized by the Joyce estate and collated from all known proofs, manuscripts, and impressions to reflect the author’s original wishes. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man

9158659c-e2c2-4aeb-bd08-d74c3a99c1c4-1

Leo Tolstoy

Richard Pevear

Larissa Volokhonsky

Heavy Paperback (2 to 4 lbs)

(Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)

The must-have Pevear and Volokhonsky translation of one of the greatest Russian novels ever written Described by William Faulkner as the best novel ever written and by Fyodor Dostoevsky as “flawless,” Anna Karenina tells of the doomed love affair between the sensuous and rebellious Anna and the dashing officer, Count Vronsky. Tragedy unfolds as Anna rejects her passionless marriage and thereby exposes herself to the hypocrisies of society. Set against a vast and richly textured canvas of nineteenth-century Russia, the novel's seven major characters create a dynamic imbalance, playing out the contrasts of city and country life and all the variations on love and family happiness. While previous versions have softened the robust and sometimes shocking qualities of Tolstoy's writing, Pevear and Volokhonsky have produced a translation true to his powerful voice. This authoritative edition, which received the PEN Translation Prize and was an Oprah Book Club™ selection, also includes an illuminating introduction and explanatory notes. Beautiful, vigorous, and eminently readable, this Anna Karenina will be the definitive text for fans of the film and generations to come. This Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition also features French flaps and deckle-edged paper. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Anna Karenina

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WIth the publication of The Sun Also Rises in 1926, Ernest Hemingway had his first great success as a writer. This is the novel that spoke for what Gertrude Stein called the
"lost generation," the young men and women who lived through the heady and uncertain period following World War I. Depicting a group of lively but aimless expatriates who travel across France and Spain-drink-ing, fishing, and going to the bullfights at the Pamplona fiesta-this book gained a special hold on the young Hemingway's contemporaries.

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

The Sun Also Rises

Steven Millhauser

FROM THE PULITZER PRIZE-WINNING AUTHOR
hailed by The New Yorker as
"a virtuoso of wak-
ing dreams" comes a dazzling new collection of darkly comic stories united by their obsession with ob-session. In Dangerous Laughter, Steven Millhauser transports us to unknown universes that uncannily resemble our own.
The collection is divided into three parts that fit seamlessly together as a whole. It opens with a bang, as "Cat 'n' Mouse" reimagines the deadly ritual between cartoon rivals in a comedy of dynamite and anvils a masterly prologue that sets the stage for the alluring, very grown-up twists that follow.
Part One,
"Vanishing Acts," features stories of risk
and escape: a lonely woman disappears without a trace; a high school boy becomes entangled with his best friend's troubled sister; and a group of teenagers play a treacherous game that pushes them deep into
"the kingdom of forbidden things.
Excess reigns in the vivid, haunting places of Part Two's "Impossible Architectures," where domes enclose whole cities, and a king's master miniaturist creates objects so tiny that soon his entire world is invisible.
Finally, "Heretical Histories" presents startling alternatives to the remembered past. "A Precursor of the Cinema" proposes a new, enigmatic form of illu-sion. And in the astonishing "The Wizard of West Orange" a famous inventor sets out to simulate the sense of touch-but success brings disturbing conse-quences.
Sensual, mysterious, Dangerous Laughter is a mesmerizing journey through brilliantly realized laby: rinths of mortal pleasures that stretch the boundaries of the ordinary world to their limits-and occasionally beyond 

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author hailed by The New Yorker as a virtuoso of waking dreams comes a dazzling new collection of darkly comic stories united by their obsession with obsession.

Dangerous Laughter

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This Edwardian social comedy explores love and prim propriety among an eccentric cast of characters assembled in an Italian pensione and in a corner of
Surrey, England.
A charming young English woman, Lucy Honeychurch, faints into the arms of a fellow Britisher when she witnesses a murder in a Florentine piazza. Attracted to this man, George Emerson—who is entirely unsuitable and whose father just may be a Socialist-Lucy is soon at war with the snobbery of her class and her own conflicting desires. Back in England she is courted by a more acceptable, if stifling, suitor, and soon realizes she must make a startling decision that will decide the course of her future: she is forced to choose between convention and passion.
The enduring delight of this tale of romantic intrigue is rooted in Forster's colorful characters, including outrageous spinsters, pompous clergymen and outspoken patriots. Written in 1908,
A Room with a View is one of E. M. Forster's earliest and most celebrated works.
With an Introduction by Mona Simpson

A Room with a View

Louise Erdrich

A Novel

A New York Times Notable Book of 2017 Louise Erdrich, the New York Times bestselling, National Book Award-winning author of LaRose and The Round House, paints a startling portrait of a young woman fighting for her life and her unborn child against oppressive forces that manifest in the wake of a cataclysmic event. The world as we know it is ending. Evolution has reversed itself, affecting every living creature on earth. Science cannot stop the world from running backwards, as woman after woman gives birth to infants that appear to be primitive species of humans. Twenty-six-year-old Cedar Hawk Songmaker, adopted daughter of a pair of big-hearted, open-minded Minneapolis liberals, is as disturbed and uncertain as the rest of America around her. But for Cedar, this change is profound and deeply personal. She is four months pregnant. Though she wants to tell the adoptive parents who raised her from infancy, Cedar first feels compelled to find her birth mother, Mary Potts, an Ojibwe living on the reservation, to understand both her and her baby’s origins. As Cedar goes back to her own biological beginnings, society around her begins to disintegrate, fueled by a swelling panic about the end of humanity. There are rumors of martial law, of Congress confining pregnant women. Of a registry, and rewards for those who turn these wanted women in. Flickering through the chaos are signs of increasing repression: a shaken Cedar witnesses a family wrenched apart when police violently drag a mother from her husband and child in a parking lot. The streets of her neighborhood have been renamed with Bible verses. A stranger answers the phone when she calls her adoptive parents, who have vanished without a trace. It will take all Cedar has to avoid the prying eyes of potential informants and keep her baby safe. A chilling dystopian novel both provocative and prescient, Future Home of the Living God is a startlingly original work from one of our most acclaimed writers: a moving meditation on female agency, self-determination, biology, and natural rights that speaks to the troubling changes of our time.

Future Home of the Living God

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Rips and teats in front and back covers but pages in good condition, very clean. 1985 edition with intro by Walker Percy

A Vonfederacy of Dunces

Nathaniel Hawthorne

Nina Baym

Thomas E. Connolly

Condition is good, but I marked it fair because of the highlights and marginal notes the previous owner created. On the whole, the notes are actually helpful 

A dramatic, moving depiction of social defiance and social deference

A stark and allegorical tale of adultery, guilt, and social repression in Puritan New England, The Scarlet Letteris a foundational work of American literature. Nathaniel Hawthorne's exploration of the dichotomy between the public and private self, internal passion and external convention, gives us the unforgettable Hester Prynne, who discovers strength in the face of ostracism and emerges as a heroine ahead of her time.

Introduction by Nina Baym
Notes by Thomas E. Connolly

The Scarlet Letter

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Charles Dickens

Nicola Bradbury

Hablot K. Browne

Pages are very clean, no underlining or highlighting, crease in front cover, small water stain in back inside cover. Spine and binding are in good condition.

This novel, set in a fog-bound London, centres around two stories: the two wards of court caught up in a never-ending court case and the story of the beautiful Lady Dedlock and her terrible secret.

Bleak House

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Joseph O'Neill

Abandoned amid the offbeat inhabitants of the Chelsea Hotel when his English wife and son return to London following September 11th, Hans, a banker originally from the Netherlands, struggles to find himself in his adopted country, until he stumbles upon a vibrant New York cricket subculture and the charismatic Chuck Ramkissoon. Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Reprint.

Netherland

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Elizabeth McKenzie

2" tear in bottom right front cover that has been repaired with clear packing tape. All inner pages are in great shape!

Longlisted for the 2016 National Book Award for Fiction Finalist for the Baileys Prize for Women's Fiction An exuberant, one-of-a-kind novel about love and family, war and nature, new money and old values by a brilliant New Yorker contributor The Portable Veblen is a dazzlingly original novel that’s as big-hearted as it is laugh-out-loud funny. Set in and around Palo Alto, amid the culture clash of new money and old (antiestablishment) values, and with the specter of our current wars looming across its pages, The Portable Veblen is an unforgettable look at the way we live now. A young couple on the brink of marriage—the charming Veblen and her fiancé Paul, a brilliant neurologist—find their engagement in danger of collapse. Along the way they weather everything from each other’s dysfunctional families, to the attentions of a seductive pharmaceutical heiress, to an intimate tête-à-tête with a very charismatic squirrel. Veblen (named after the iconoclastic economist Thorstein Veblen, who coined the term “conspicuous consumption”) is one of the most refreshing heroines in recent fiction. Not quite liberated from the burdens of her hypochondriac, narcissistic mother and her institutionalized father, Veblen is an amateur translator and “freelance self”; in other words, she’s adrift. Meanwhile, Paul—the product of good hippies who were bad parents—finds his ambition soaring. His medical research has led to the development of a device to help minimize battlefield brain trauma—an invention that gets him swept up in a high-stakes deal with the Department of Defense, a Bizarro World that McKenzie satirizes with granular specificity. As Paul is swept up by the promise of fame and fortune, Veblen heroically keeps the peace between all the damaged parties involved in their upcoming wedding, until she finds herself falling for someone—or something—else. Throughout, Elizabeth McKenzie asks: Where do our families end and we begin? How do we stay true to our ideals? And what is that squirrel really thinking? Replete with deadpan photos and sly appendices, The Portable Veblen is at once an honest inquiry into what we look for in love and an electrifying reading experience.

The Portable Veblen

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Anne Lamott

Some Thoughts on Faith

Combining elements of spiritual study and memoir, the author describes her odyssey of faith, drawing on her own sometimes troubled past to explore the many ways in which faith sustains and guides one's daily life

Traveling Mercies

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Ford Madox Ford

A Tale of Passion

`The only novel of mine that I considered...at all to count'. Ford's study of the complex social and sexual relationship between an Edwardian English and American couple is narrated in such a seemingly haphazard way that it has perplexed and delighted readers since its publication in 1915. Despite its catalogue of death, insanity, and despair, this `Tale of Passion' has many comic moments, and has inspired the work of several distinguished writers, including Graham Greene. This is the only annotated student edition available. - ;`The only novel of mine that I considered...at all to count'. Ford's study of the complex social and sexual relationship between an Edwardian English and American couple is narrated in such a seemingly haphazard way that it has perplexed and delighted readers since its publication in 1915. Despite its catalogue of death, insanity, and despair, this `Tale of Passion' has many comic moments, and has inspired the work of several distinguished writers, including Graham Greene. This is the only annotated student edition available. -

The Good Soldier

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Alexander McCall Smith

A Detective Varg Novel

From the beloved and bestselling author of the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series comes a lighthearted comedic novel about a Swedish police department tasked with solving the most unusual, complicated, and, often, insignificant crimes. The detectives who work in Malmo Police's Department of Sensitive Crimes take their job very seriously. The lead detective, Ulf Varg, prioritizes his cases above even his dog's mental health. Then there are detectives Anna Bengsdotter, who keeps her relationship with Varg professional even as she realizes she's developing feelings for him . . . or at least for his classic car; and Carl Holgersson, first to arrive in the morning and last to leave, who would never read his colleagues' personal correspondence--unless it could help solve a crime, of course. Finally, there's Erik Nykvist, who is deeply committed to fly fishing. Along with an opinionated local police officer named Blomquist, the Department of Sensitive Crimes takes on three extremely strange cases. First, the detectives investigate how and why a local business owner was stabbed . . . in the back of the knee. Next, a young woman's imaginary boyfriend goes missing. And, in the final investigation, Varg must determine whether nocturnal visitations at a local spa have a supernatural element. Using his renowned wit and warmth, Alexander McCall Smith brings a unique perspective on Scandinavian crime. Equal parts hilarious and heartening, The Department of Sensitive Crimes is a tour de farce from a literary master.

The Department of Sensitive Crimes

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Jane Smiley

Longlisted for the 2014 National Book Award From the winner of the Pulitzer Prize: a powerful, engrossing new novel—the life and times of a remarkable family over three transformative decades in America. On their farm in Denby, Iowa, Rosanna and Walter Langdon abide by time-honored values that they pass on to their five wildly different children: from Frank, the handsome, willful first born, and Joe, whose love of animals and the land sustains him, to Claire, who earns a special place in her father's heart. Each chapter in Some Luck covers a single year, beginning in 1920, as American soldiers like Walter return home from World War I, and going up through the early 1950s, with the country on the cusp of enormous social and economic change. As the Langdons branch out from Iowa to both coasts of America, the personal and the historical merge seamlessly: one moment electricity is just beginning to power the farm, and the next a son is volunteering to fight the Nazis; later still, a girl you'd seen growing up now has a little girl of her own, and you discover that your laughter and your admiration for all these lives are mixing with tears. Some Luck delivers on everything we look for in a work of fiction. Taking us through cycles of births and deaths, passions and betrayals, among characters we come to know inside and out, it is a tour de force that stands wholly on its own. But it is also the first part of a dazzling epic trilogy—a literary adventure that will span a century in America: an astonishing feat of storytelling by a beloved writer at the height of her powers. From the Hardcover edition.

Some Luck

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Jack Barbera

William McBrien

A Biography of Stevie Smith

Stevie

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Stuart Turton

Evelyn Hardcastle will die. Every day until Aiden Bishop can identify her killer and break the cycle.
But every time the day begins again, Aiden wakes up in the body of a different guest. And some of his hosts are more helpful than others...

(Condition note: Slight bend in top left cover.)

"Agatha Christie meets Groundhog Day...quite unlike anything I've ever read, and altogether triumphant." -- A. J. Finn, #1 New York Times-bestselling author of The Woman in the Window Shortlisted for the Costa Award One of Stylist Magazine's 20 Must-Read Books of 2018 One of Harper's Bazaar's 10 Must-Read Books of 2018 One of Guardian's Best Books of 2018 The Rules of Blackheath Evelyn Hardcastle will be murdered at 11:00 p.m. There are eight days, and eight witnesses for you to inhabit. We will only let you escape once you tell us the name of the killer. Understood? Then let's begin... *** Evelyn Hardcastle will die. Every day until Aiden Bishop can identify her killer and break the cycle. But every time the day begins again, Aiden wakes up in the body of a different guest. And some of his hosts are more helpful than others... The most inventive debut of the year twists together a mystery of such unexpected creativity it will leave readers guessing until the very last page.

The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle

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F. Scott Fitzgerald

A story of Americans on the French Riviera in the 1930s is a portrait of psychological disintegration as a wealthy couple supports friends and hangers-on financially and emotionally at the cost of their own stability

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