Jonathan R. Wynn

Profiles of New York tour guides.

Spot on bottom edge near spine, otherwise excellent condition.


Paperback (1 to 2 lbs)

New York

Walking and Talking New York

Everyone wants to visit New York at least once. The Big Apple is a global tourist destination with a dizzying array of attractions throughout the five boroughs. This title provides long history of tour-giving across the globe as well as the ups and downs of New York's tour guide industry in the wake of 9/11.

The Tour Guide

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#paperback #essay #clothing #apparel #objectlessons #bloomsbury #culturalstudies

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.

We all wear hoods: the Grim Reaper, Red Riding Hood, torturers, executioners and the executed, athletes, laborers, anarchists, rappers, babies in onesies, and anyone who's ever grabbed a hoodie on a chilly day. Alison Kinney's Hood explores the material and symbolic vibrancy of this everyday garment and political semaphore, which often protects the powerful at the expense of the powerless-with deadly results. Kinney considers medieval clerics and the Klan, anti-hoodie campaigns and the Hooded Man of Abu Ghraib, the Inquisition and the murder of Trayvon Martin, uncovering both the hooded perpetrators of violence and the hooded victims in their sights.

Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

Hood

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#paperback #poems #poetry #faberandfaber #czech

Far from showing signs of having mellowed with age in the last years of his life, Miroslav Holub gave us, in The Rampage, a collection of poems of startling visionary intensity. The wit, the irony, the formal tightness and the imagistic memorability of his earlier work are all still very much in evidence, but here they are allied to a view of the world that owes as much to the nightmare paintings of Bosch and Breughel as to the findings of modern science, in which Dr Holub himself was an internationally recognised expert. The results, available to us thanks to unusually sympathetic translations, done in consultation with the author, are hair-raisingly immediate in their impact. This was a fitting addition to an already varied and significant output.

The Rampage

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#hardcover #nonfiction #truecrime #lolita #kidnapping #sarahorner #weinman 

Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

The Kidnapping of Sally Horner and the Novel That Scandalized the World

“The Real Lolita is a tour de force of literary detective work. Not only does it shed new light on the terrifying true saga that influenced Nabokov’s masterpiece, it restores the forgotten victim to our consciousness.” —David Grann, author of Killers of the Flower Moon Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita is one of the most beloved and notorious novels of all time. And yet, very few of its readers know that the subject of the novel was inspired by a real-life case: the 1948 abduction of eleven-year-old Sally Horner. Weaving together suspenseful crime narrative, cultural and social history, and literary investigation, The Real Lolita tells Sally Horner’s full story for the very first time. Drawing upon extensive investigations, legal documents, public records, and interviews with remaining relatives, Sarah Weinman uncovers how much Nabokov knew of the Sally Horner case and the efforts he took to disguise that knowledge during the process of writing and publishing Lolita. Sally Horner’s story echoes the stories of countless girls and women who never had the chance to speak for themselves. By diving deeper in the publication history of Lolita and restoring Sally to her rightful place in the lore of the novel’s creation, The Real Lolita casts a new light on the dark inspiration for a modern classic.

The Real Lolita

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Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

The Programis a unique work of stark humour and pathos that seduces its readers into the world of advertising guru Maury Stern. Through chain restaurants, forest reserves, Zionist summer camps, abandoned amusement parks and eastern European shtetls, the novel chases a mystery: what happened to Maury’s son, Danny, the night he was left alone with his uncle. Funny, fallible and lost, Maury blows up his life attempting to find the answer. His monster brother, the bogeyman of Danny’s childhood, has gone missing: is Maury still his brother’s keeper? His mum, Bubby Stern, is plugging her brain with the contents of American soap operas to avoid the secret she has carried since her girlhood: why can’t Maury be a good son and make her happy? When a simple camping trip with Danny turns into another horror show, Maury takes one look at the reproach in his wife’s eyes and runs away. Staggering under the weight of everyone’s desire for him to please be normal again, the wounded Danny can’t tackle the mystery of himself directly. Instead he disappears into the computer lab where he writes The Program — as a way to an alternative reality where the conflicting agendas of past, present and future may be resolved.

The Program

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Worn (possibly a former library copy) but very readable - see pictures. #hardcover #psychoanalysis #novel #italian #1923

As a form of therapy, Zeno's doctor advises him to write his memoirs. The patient reconstructs the events in his life into a palatable reality founded upon compromise and rationalization.

Confessions of Zeno

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#paperback #anthology #avantpop #postmodern #experimental #markleyner #williamgibson #dondelillo #brucesterling #paulauster

The Avant-Pop Anthology

Some of the hottest writers of the 90's shared a subversive aesthetic sensibility, "avant-pop," that drew on the forms, images, slogans, characters, and narrative archetypes of our multidimensional, information-dense culture--cartoons, films, music videos, advertising, and rock music--to explore and critically examine that culture.
 
Each of these thirty-two works delves into the deeper metaphorical implications of this pop cultural imagery to convey a turn toward overstimulation and hyper-consumption in American life, and to explore issues of personality and identity. This provocative, stylistically experimental work is truly literature for the twenty-first century.

After Yesterday's Crash

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#stories #shortstories #humor #postmodern #postmodernist #postmodernism #metafiction #paperback #debutbook

I Smell Esther Williams and Other Stories

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Some water warping affecting the first sixty or so pages. #novel #humor #postmodern #postmodernist #postmodernism #metafiction #vintagecontemporaries#paperback 

In this fiendishly original new novel, Mark Leyner is a leather-blazer-wearing, Piranha 793-driving, narcotic-guzzling monster who has potential rivals eliminated by his bionically enhanced bodyguards, has his internal organs tattooed, and eavesdrops on the erotic fantasies of Victoria's Secret models -- which naturally revolve around him.

Leyner's jet-propelled roller derby through the cultures of celebrity, cyberpunk, and rabid egotism is exhilaratingly bizarre, exhaustingly funny -- and you'd better hope it's just fiction.

Et Tu, Babe

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#hardcover #bohemia #bohemians #english #culturalhistory

Experiments in Living 1900-1939

Subversive, eccentric and flamboyant, the artistic community in England in the first half of the twentieth century was engaged in the bold experiment of refashioning not just their art, but their daily lives. They reinvented the home, challenging and rejecting the smug certainties of the Victorian bourgeoisie, in what amounted to a domestic revolution.

From Roy Campbell's recipe for bouillabaisse to Iris Tree cutting off her braid and leaving it behind on a train, creativity entered every aspect of these people's lives. Bohemians ate garlic and didn't always bathe; they listened to Wagner and worshipped Diaghilev; they sent their children to coeducational schools, explored homosexuality and free love, vegetarianism and Postimpres-sionism. They were often drunk and broke, sometimes hungry, but they were of a rebellious spirit. Inhabiting the same England with Phil-istines and Puritans was a parallel minority of moral pioneers, traveling third class and coping with faulty fireplaces.

This is a book about a search for truth and beauty in small things; it is also about sacrifice, liberty, class conflict and the generation war. In many cases, Bohemia's headlong idealism collided disastrously with the demands of everyday life. Accompanying the victories in this rebellion was an anarchic clutter of bounced checks, blocked drains, whooping cough, and incontinent cats. Sometimes artists felt lost amid the turmoil of new freedoms. Contempt for convention led all too often to poverty, divorce, addiction and even death.

Many of the heroes and heroines of this transitional time are half-forgotten, neglected characters from the footnotes of history who achieved little of artistic durability. Their voices have seldom been heard, but their valiant approach to the art of living deserves to be celebrated. For where they led, we have followed. Gradually, imperceptibly, Bohemia changed society. Among the Bohemians testifies to that quiet revolution.

Among the Bohemians

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#hardcover #englishculture #history #weather #climate #culturalhistory #thamesandhudson

Heavy Hardcover (2 to 4 lbs)

Writers and Artists under English Skies

In a sweeping panorama, Weatherland allows us to witness England's cultural climates across the centuries. Before the Norman Conquest, Anglo-Saxons living in a wintry world wrote about the coldness of exile or the shelters they had to defend against enemies outside. The Middle Ages brought the warmth of spring; the new lyrics were sung in praise of blossoms and cuckoos. Descriptions of a rainy night are rare before 1700, but by the end of the eighteenth century the Romantics had adopted the squall as a fit subject for their most probing thoughts.



The weather is vast and yet we experience it intimately, and Alexandra Harris builds her remarkable story from small evocative details. There is the drawing of a twelfth-century man in February, warming bare toes by the fire. There is the tiny glass left behind from the Frost Fair of 1684, and the Sunspan house in Angmering that embodies the bright ambitions of the 1930s. Harris catches the distinct voices of compelling individuals. "Bloody cold," says Jonathan Swift in the "slobbery" January of 1713. Percy Shelley wants to become a cloud and John Ruskin wants to bottle one. Weatherland is a celebration of English air and a life story of those who have lived in it.

Weatherland

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#hardcover #nytimes #unexpected #wanderlust #adventure #frugaltraveler #budgetvacation

A Guide for the Globally Curious

By captivating millions during his six-year, fifty-country tenure as the New York Times's "Frugal Traveler," Seth Kugel has become one of our most internationally beloved travel writers. While his famously unassuming journeys around the globe have forged a signature philosophy of whimsy and practicality, they have also revealed the seemingly infinite booby traps of on-the-grid tourism. In a book with widespread cultural reverberations, Kugel takes the modern travel industry to task, determined to reignite humanity's age-old sense of adventure that has virtually been vanquished by the spontaneity-obliterating likes of Google Maps, TripAdvisor, and Starwood points. Woven throughout with vivid tales of his perfectly imperfect adventures, Rediscovering Travel explains--often hilariously--how to make the most of new digital technologies without being shackled to them. For the tight-belted tourist and the first-class flyer, the eager student and the comfort-seeking retiree, Kugel shows how we too can rediscover the joy of discovery.

Rediscovering Travel

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#paperback #fiction #novel #neworleans #frenchquarter #1930s #nola

A Novel

With its depictions of the downtrodden prostitutes, bootleggers, and hustlers of Perdido Street in the old French Quarter of 1930s New Orleans, Nelson Algren's A Walk in the Wild Side has found a place in the imaginations of all generations since it first appeared.

As Algren admitted, the book "wasn't written until long after it had been walked . . . I found my way to the streets on the other side of the Southern Pacific station, where the big jukes were singing something called 'Walking the Wild Side of Life.' I've stayed pretty much on that side of the curb ever since."

Perhaps the author's own words describe this classic work best: "The book asks why lost people sometimes develop into greater human beings than those who have never been lost in their whole lives. Why men who have suffered at the hands of other men are the natural believers in humanity, while those whose part has been simply to acquire, to take all and give nothing, are the most contemptuous of mankind."

A Walk on the Wild Side

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#hardcover #fiction #virgilflowers Dust jacket beat up and has a small rip at lower right front, but the book itself is fine and makes a good reading copy. #mystery #procedural #thriller 

A Virgil Flowers Novel

Shock Wave

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#paperback #london #history #oup #oxforduniversitypress

A History

"When a man is tired of London," Samuel Johnson noted in 1777, "he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford." Indeed, for almost two thousand years, London has been the political, cultural, and economic heart of Britain, and one of the great hubs of world affairs.
Now, in this fascinating volume, the doyen of London historians, Francis Sheppard, provides the definitive account of London's diverse past, from its origins as a Roman settlement (founded at the lowest bridgeable point across the Thames) to the world-class metropolis it is today. It provides
a vivid account of a city which was the `deere sweete' place which Chaucer loved more than any other city on earth, which was for Dickens his `magic lantern', and to Keats `a great sea', howling for more wrecks. It is also a story of much contrast and remarkable resilience; through great fires and
pestilence, civil war, and the Blitz, London has rebuilt and reinvented itself for each generation.
"Sheppard is the great authority to whom we all look up," Roy Porter has written. "He has made the history of London his life's work, and I suspect there's no one in the world with so full a knowledge and so rich a grasp as he of sources, physical fabric, and all manner of details." In this
colorful new history, Sheppard takes us on a fascinating voyage through London's past. It is the definitive account of the rise to power of one of the world's great metropolitan centers.

London

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#hardcover #wwii #1940s #nyc #biography #history #africanamerican #pearlprimus #annpetry #marylouwilliams

Women Artists and Progressive Politics During World War II

As World War II raged overseas, Harlem witnessed a battle of its own. Brimming with creative and political energy, the neighborhood's diverse array of artists and activists took advantage of a brief period of progressivism during the war years to launch a bold cultural offensive aimed at winning democracy for all Americans, regardless of race or gender. Ardent believers in America's promise, these men and women helped to lay the groundwork for the Civil Rights Movement before Cold War politics and anti-Communist fervor temporarily froze their dreams at the dawn of the postwar era.

In Harlem Nocturne, esteemed scholar Farah Jasmine Griffin tells the stories of three black female artists whose creative and political efforts fueled this historic movement for change: choreographer and dancer Pearl Primus, composer and pianist Mary Lou Williams, and novelist Ann Petry. Like many African Americans in the city at the time, these women weren't't native New Yorkers, but the metropolis and its vibrant cultural scene gave them the space to flourish and the freedom to express their political concerns. Pearl Primus performed nightly at the legendary Cafe Society, the first racially integrated club in New York, where she debuted dances of social protest that drew on long-buried African traditions and the dances of former slaves in the South. Williams, meanwhile, was a major figure in the emergence of bebop, collaborating with Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, and Bud Powell and premiering her groundbreaking Zodiac Suite at the legendary performance space Town Hall. And Ann Petry conveyed the struggles of working-class black women to a national audience with her acclaimed novel The Street, which sold over a million copies -- a first for a female African American author.

A rich biography of three artists and the city that inspired them, Harlem Nocturne captures a period of unprecedented vitality and progress for African Americans and women, revealing a cultural movement and a historical moment whose influence endures today.

Harlem Nocturne

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One crease on back cover but otherwise very clean, readable copy. #paperback #history #1919 #paris #wilson #lloydgeorge #clemenceau #parispeacetalks #empire #samueljohnsonprize

Six Months That Changed the World

National Bestseller New York Times Editors’ Choice Winner of the PEN Hessell Tiltman Prize Winner of the Duff Cooper Prize Silver Medalist for the Arthur Ross Book Award of the Council on Foreign Relations Finalist for the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award For six months in 1919, after the end of “the war to end all wars,” the Big Three—President Woodrow Wilson, British prime minister David Lloyd George, and French premier Georges Clemenceau—met in Paris to shape a lasting peace. In this landmark work of narrative history, Margaret MacMillan gives a dramatic and intimate view of those fateful days, which saw new political entities—Iraq, Yugoslavia, and Palestine, among them—born out of the ruins of bankrupt empires, and the borders of the modern world redrawn.

Paris 1919

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1969 printing of Penguin Modern Classics edition. #paperback #satire #military #humor #czech #darkcomedy #worldwari #greatwar #firstworldwar

The Good Soldier Schweik

#paperback #carriepilby #reddressink #chicklit  #funny #singlelife

Starting from Square Two by Caren Lissner released on Feb 23, 2004 is available now for purchase.

Starting from Square Two

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1964 Sentry edition. Some underlining but very readable. #paperback #worldwari #greatwar #firstworldwar #novel #1920s 

Three Soldiers

#buffy #fandom #harrypotter #doctorwho #starwars #nerdculture #marvel #mcu #essays #culturalcriticism 

Adventures in Fandom from This Universe to the Multiverse

In the vein of You're Never Weird on the Internet (Almost) and Black Nerd Problems, this witty, incisive essay collection from New York Times critic at large Maya Phillips explores race, religion, sexuality, and more through the lens of her favorite pop culture fandoms.

From the moment Maya Phillips saw the opening scroll of Star Wars, Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back, her life changed forever. Her formative years were spent loving not just the Star Wars saga, but superhero cartoons, anime, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Harry Potter, Tolkien, and Doctor Who--to name just a few.

As a critic at large at The New York Times, Phillips has written extensively on theater, poetry, and the latest blockbusters--with her love of some of the most popular and nerdy fandoms informing her career. Now, she analyzes the mark these beloved intellectual properties leave on young and adult minds, and what they teach us about race, gender expression, religion, and more.

Spanning from the 90s through to today, Nerd is a collection of cultural criticism essays through the lens of fandom for everyone from the casual Marvel movie watcher to the hardcore Star Wars expanded universe connoisseur. "In the same way that the fandoms Phillips addresses often provide community and a sense of connection, the experience of reading Nerd feels like making a new friend" (Karen Han, cultural critic and screenwriter).

Nerd

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#hardcover #travel #history #dystopia #landscape

Histories of Places Not yet Forgotten

"Why are Kazakhstan and Montana the same place?" asks one chapter of Kate Brown's surprising and unusual journey into the histories of places on the margins, overlooked or erased. It turns out that a ruined mining town in Kazakhstan and Butte, Montana--America's largest environmental Superfund site--have much more in common than one would think thanks to similarities in climate, hucksterism, and the perseverance of their few hardy inhabitants. Taking readers to these and other unlikely locales, Dispatches from Dystopia delves into the very human and sometimes very fraught ways we come to understand a particular place, its people, and its history.



In Dispatches from Dystopia, Brown wanders the Chernobyl Zone of Alienation, first on the Internet and then in person, to figure out which version--the real or the virtual--is the actual forgery. She also takes us to the basement of a hotel in Seattle to examine the personal possessions left in storage by Japanese-Americans on their way to internment camps in 1942. In Uman, Ukraine, we hide with Brown in a tree in order to witness the annual male-only Rosh Hashanah celebration of Hasidic Jews. In the Russian southern Urals, she speaks with the citizens of the small city of Kyshtym, where invisible radioactive pollutants have mysteriously blighted lives. Finally, Brown returns home to Elgin, Illinois, in the midwestern industrial rust belt to investigate the rise of "rustalgia" and the ways her formative experiences have inspired her obsession with modernist wastelands.

 

Dispatches from Dystopia powerfully and movingly narrates the histories of locales that have been silenced, broken, or contaminated. In telling these previously unknown stories, Brown examines the making and unmaking of place, and the lives of the people who remain in the fragile landscapes that are left behind.

Dispatches from Dystopia

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#hardcover #fiction #novel #debut #debutnovel #islam #statenisland #newyork #nyc 

An astonishing debut novel about family, sexuality, and capitalist systems of control, following three adopted brothers who live above a mosque in Staten Island with their imam father

In 1990, three boys are born, unrelated but intertwined by circumstance: Dayo, Iseul, and Youssef. They are adopted as infants and share a bedroom perched atop a mosque in one of Staten Island's most diverse and underserved neighborhoods. The three boys are an inseparable trio, but conspicuous: Dayo is of Nigerian origin, Iseul is Korean, and Youssef indeterminately Middle Eastern. Youssef shares everything with his brothers, except for one secret: he sees a hallucinatory double, an imaginary friend who seems absolutely real, a shapeshifting familiar he calls Brother. Brother persists as a companion into Youssef's adult life, supporting him but also stealing his memories and shaking his grip on the world.

The boys' adoptive father, Imam Salim, is known in the community for his stirring and radical sermons, but at home he often keeps himself to himself, spending his evenings in his study with whiskey-laced coffee, reading poetry or writing letters to his former compatriots back in Saudi Arabia. Like Youssef, he too has secrets, including the cause of his failing health and the truth about what happened to the boys' parents. When, years later, Imam Salim's path takes him back to Saudi Arabia, the boys, now adults, will be forced to follow. There they will be captivated by an opulent, almost futuristic world, a linear city that seems to offer a more sustainable modernity than that of the West. But this conversion has come at a great cost, and Youssef and Brother too will have to decide if they should change to survive, or try to mount a defense of their deeply-held beliefs.

Stylistically brilliant, intellectually acute, and deft in its treatment of complex themes, Brother Alive is a remarkable debut by a hugely talented writer that questions the nature of belief and explores the possibility of reunion for those who are broken.

Brother Alive

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#paperback #history #modernism #newyork #nyc #bohemian #greenwichvillage

Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century

A brilliant account of the legary American bohemians, hailed as the best book ever written about this era, these people, and the ways they shook up our national culture for good (Michael Kazin)
In the early years of the twentieth century, an exuberant band of talented individualists living in a shabby neighborhood called Greenwich Village set out to change the world. Committed to free speech, free love, and politically engaged art, they swept away sexual prudery, stodgy bourgeois art, and political conservatism as they clamorously declared the birth of the new.
Christine Stansell offers the first comprehensive history of this legary period. She takes us deep into the downtown bohemia, which brought together creative dissenters from all walks of life: hoboes and Harvard men, society matrons and immigrant Jews, Wobblies and New Women, poets and anarchists. And she depicts their lyrical hopes for the century they felt they were sponsoring -- a radiant vision of modernity, both egalitarian and artful, that flourished briefly, poignantly, until America entered the First World War and patriotism trumped self-expression.


Browse by categories

Jonathan R. Wynn

The Tour Guide

Alison Kinney; Christopher Schaberg (Series edited by); Ian Bogost (Series edited by)

Hood

Miroslav Holub

The Rampage

Sarah Weinman

The Real Lolita

Hal Niedzviecki

The Program

Italo Svevo; Beryl de Zoete (Translator)

Confessions of Zeno

Larry McCaffery (Editor)

After Yesterday's Crash

Mark Leyner

I Smell Esther Williams and Other Stories

Mark Leyner

Et Tu, Babe

Virginia Nicholson

Among the Bohemians

Alexandra Harris

Weatherland

Seth Kugel

Rediscovering Travel

Nelson Algren; Russell Banks (Foreword by)

A Walk on the Wild Side

John Sandford

Shock Wave

Francis Sheppard

London

Farah Jasmine Griffin

Harlem Nocturne

Margaret MacMillan; Richard Holbrooke (Foreword by)

Paris 1919

Jaroslav Hasek

The Good Soldier Schweik

Caren Lissner

Starting from Square Two

John Dos Passos

Three Soldiers

Maya Phillips

Nerd

Kate Brown

Dispatches from Dystopia

Zain Khalid

Brother Alive

Christine Stansell

American Moderns

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