Doris Lessing

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

Massachusetts

My Autobiography to 1949

Under My Skin

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Heavy Hardcover (2 to 4 lbs)

Volume Two of My Autobiography--1949-1962

Doris Lessing joined the Communist Party in London, and here she explores the allure Communism held for artists, intellectuals, and social reformist idealists in the '50s. A fascinating meditation on the psychological, sociological and historical roots of a generation's behavior, Lessing offers insight into the ideological and political madness of the post-war era. Lessing also evokes the bohemian life she led in post-war London: her work in the theater, her romantic liaisons, her books, her single parenting and the tenor and texture of life in the '50s. Among those who appear in these pages are Clancy Sigal, Nelson Algren, Henry Kissinger, Kenneth Tynan and Bertrand Russell, to name a few. She muses at length about the relationships between men and women, offering provocative insights into the attitudes of American men toward sex, women and love. The last section of the memoir describes the writing of her most famous novel, The Golden Notebook. It offers a fascinating account of the creative process by which a literary masterpiece is conceived and executed.

Walking in the Shade

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Aeschylus

Robert Fagles

W. B. Stanford

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

Agamemnon; the Libation Bearers; the Eumenides

In the Oresteia Aeschylus addressed the bloody chain of murder and revenge within the royal family of Argos. As they move from darkness to light, from rage to self-governance, from primitive ritual to civilized institution, their spirit of struggle and regeneration becomes an everlasting song of celebration. In Agamemnon, a king's decision to sacrifice his daughter and turn the tide of war inflicts lasting damage on his family, culminating in a terrible act of retribution; The Libation Bearers deals with the aftermath of Clytemnestra's regicide, as her son Orestes sets out to avenge his father's death; and in The Eumenides, Orestes is tormented by supernatural powers that can never be appeased. Forming an elegant and subtle discourse on the emergence of Athenian democracy out of a period of chaos and destruction, The Oresteia is a compelling tragedy of the tensions between our obligations to our families and the laws that bind us together as a society. The only trilogy in Greek drama that survives from antiquity, Aeschylus' The Oresteia is translated by Robert Fagles with an introduction, notes and glossary written in collaboration with W.B. Stanford in Penguin Classics. 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.

The Oresteia

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Silvina Ocampo

Daniel Balderston

Jorge Luis Borges

Helen Oyeyemi

Paperback (1 to 2 lbs)

Selected Stories

An NYRB Classics Original Thus Were Their Faces offers a comprehensive selection of the short fiction of Silvina Ocampo, undoubtedly one of the twentieth century’s great masters of the story and the novella. Here are tales of doubles and impostors, angels and demons, a marble statue of a winged horse that speaks, a beautiful seer who writes the autobiography of her own death, a lapdog who records the dreams of an old woman, a suicidal romance, and much else that is incredible, mad, sublime, and delicious. Italo Calvino has written that no other writer “better captures the magic inside everyday rituals, the forbidden or hidden face that our mirrors don’t show us.” Jorge Luis Borges flatly declared, “Silvina Ocampo is one of our best writers. Her stories have no equal in our literature.” Dark, gothic, fantastic, and grotesque, these haunting stories are among the world’s most individual and finest.

Thus Were Their Faces

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Elaine Scarry

The Making and Unmaking of the World

The Body in Pain is a profoundly original meditation on the vulnerability of the human body and the literary, political, philosophical, medical, and religious vocabularies used to describe it. Elaine Scarry bases her analysis on a wide array of sources, including literature and art, medical case histories, documents on torture compiled by Amnesty International, and the writings of such figures as Clausewitz, Churchill, and Kissinger. The author begins with the fact of pain's inexpressibility, noting not only the difficulty of describing pain, but its ability to destroy a sufferer's language. She then analyzes the political consequences of deliberately inflicted pain, particularly in cases of war and torture, showing how regimes "unmake" an individual's world in their exercise of power. From the actions that "unmake" the world Scarry turns to a discussion of actions that "make" the world -- the acts of creativity that produce language and cultural artifacts. Book jacket.

The Body in Pain

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Angela Carter

Salman Rushdie

The Collected Short Stories

Burning Your Boats

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A. S. Byatt

Presents two novellas--"The Conjugal Angel," which reveals human preoccupation with God and life after death, and "Morpho Eugenia," a gothic fable about Victorian obsessions with Darwinism and sexuality

Angels and Insects

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Annie Dillard

A book that instantly captured the hearts of readers across the country, An American Childhood is Pulitzer Prize-winning author Annie Dillard's poignant, vivid memoir of growing up in Pittsburgh in the 1950s.

An American Childhood

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Edna O'Brien

Eimear McBride

A treasure of world literature back in print, featuring a new introduction by Eimear McBride

This omnibus edition includes the novels The Country Girls, The Lonely Girl, and Girls in Their Married Bliss.

The country girls are Caithleen "Kate" Brady and Bridget "Baba" Brennan, and their story begins in the repressive atmosphere of a small village in the west of Ireland in the years following World War II. Kate is a romantic, looking for love; Baba is a survivor. Setting out to conquer the bright lights of Dublin, they are rewarded with comical miscommunications, furtive liaisons, bad faith, bad luck, bad sex, and compromise; marrying for the wrong reasons, betraying for the wrong reasons, fighting in their separate ways against the overwhelming wave of expectations forced upon "girls" of every era.

The Country Girls Trilogy and Epilogue charts unflinchingly the pattern of women's lives, from the high spirits of youth to the chill of middle age, from hope to despair, in remarkable prose swinging from blunt and brutal to whimsical and lyrical. It is a saga both painful and hilarious, and remains one of the major accomplishments of Edna O'Brien's extraordinary career.

The Country Girls: Three Novels and an Epilogue

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Alice Munro

Stories

A collection of short fiction explores the complexities of human relationships and emotions in stories about a housekeeper entering old-maidhood whose life is transformed by a practical joke and a lifelong philanderer who finds the tables turned.

Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage

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Kurt Vonnegut

"A free-wheeling vehicle . . . an unforgettable ride!"--The New York Times 

Cat's Cradle is Kurt Vonnegut's satirical commentary on modern man and his madness. An apocalyptic tale of this planet's ultimate fate, it features a midget as the protagonist, a complete, original theology created by a calypso singer, and a vision of the future that is at once blackly fatalistic and hilariously funny. A book that left an indelible mark on an entire generation of readers, Cat's Cradle is one of the twentieth century's most important works--and Vonnegut at his very best.

"[Vonnegut is] an unimitative and inimitable social satirist."--Harper's Magazine

"Our finest black-humorist . . . We laugh in self-defense."--Atlantic Monthly

Cat's Cradle

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Jen George

“I'm so happy this collection exists. I feel drunk with love for these stories. They're so funny and weird and true.” —Sheila Heti Five stories―several as long as novellas―introduce the world to Jen George, a writer whose furiously imaginative new voice calls to mind Donald Barthelme and Leonora Carrington no less than Kathy Acker and Chris Kraus. In “Guidance/The Party,” an ethereal alcoholic “Guide” in robes and flowing hair appears to help a thirty-three-year-old woman prepare a party for her belated adulthood; “Take Care of Me Forever” tragically lambasts the medical profession as a ship of fools afloat in loneliness and narcissism; “Instruction” chronicles a season in an unconventional art school called The Warehouse, where students divide their time between orgies, art critiques, and burying dead racehorses. Combining slapstick, surrealism, erotica, and social criticism, Jen George's sprawling creative energy belies the secret precision and unexpected tenderness of everything she writes.

The Babysitter at Rest

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Jane. Austen

In late eighteenth-century England, a spirited young woman copes with the suit of a snobbish gentleman as well as the romantic entanglements of three of her four sisters.

Pride and Prejudice

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Anna Burns

A Novel

Winner of the Man Booker Prize “Everything about this novel rings true. . . . Original, funny, disarmingly oblique and unique.”—The Guardian In an unnamed city, middle sister stands out for the wrong reasons. She reads while walking, for one. And she has been taking French night classes downtown. So when a local paramilitary known as the milkman begins pursuing her, she suddenly becomes “interesting,” the last thing she ever wanted to be. Despite middle sister’s attempts to avoid him—and to keep her mother from finding out about her maybe-boyfriend—rumors spread and the threat of violence lingers. Milkman is a story of the way inaction can have enormous repercussions, in a time when the wrong flag, wrong religion, or even a sunset can be subversive. Told with ferocious energy and sly, wicked humor, Milkman establishes Anna Burns as one of the most consequential voices of our day.

Milkman

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1985 paperback edition. In readable shape, but some of the photo pages have fallen out.

By Myself

Tony Kushner

Part Two: Perestroika

Angels in America

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No flaws, in great condition. Only writing is on the front end page.

Slight bend in the shape of the book. A few small markings throughout the pages.

Part One: Millennium Approaches

Dramatizes the effects of AIDS on the United States through the experiences of lawyer Roy Cohn, a Morman couple, and a young man called Prior Walter

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Ted Hughes

Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

A collection of poems addressed to Hughes' late wife, poetess Sylvia Plath, dealing with the psychological breakdown that led to some of her greatest poems and her untimely death

Birthday Letters

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In great condition for its age. Some tears in dusk jacket that have been taped down. No markings.

The World According to Garp

Damon Galgut

WINNER OF THE 2021 BOOKER PRIZE
A NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS' CHOICE

On her deathbed, Rachel Swart makes a promise to Salome, the family's Black maid. This promise will divide the family--especially her children: Anton, the golden boy; Astrid, whose beauty is her power; and the youngest, Amor, whose life is shaped by feelings of guilt.

Reunited by four funerals over thirty years, the dwindling Swart family remains haunted by the unmet promise, just as their country is haunted by its own failures. The Promise is an epic South African drama that unfurls against the unrelenting march of history, sure to leave its readers transformed.

"Simply: you must read it."--Claire Messud, Harper's Magazine

★ "This tour-de-force unleashes a searing portrait of a damaged family and a troubled country in need of healing."--Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)

The Promise

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Miljenko Jergovic

Russell Scott Valentino

Heavy Paperback (2 to 4 lbs)

Kin is a dazzling family epic from one of Croatia's most prized writers. In this sprawling narrative which spans the entire twentieth century, Miljenko Jergović peers into the dusty corners of his family's past, illuminating them with a tender, poetic precision.

Ordinary, forgotten objects - a grandfather's beekeeping journals, a rusty benzene lighter, an army issued raincoat - become the lenses through which Jergović investigates the joys and sorrows of a family living through a century of war. The work is ultimately an ode to Yugoslavia - Jergović sees his country through the devastation of the First World War, the Second, the Cold, then the Bosnian war of the 90s; through its changing street names and borders, shifting seasons, through its social rituals at graveyards, operas, weddings, markets - rendering it all in loving, vivid detail. A portrait of an era.

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Robert James Waller

Fall in love with one of the bestselling novels of all time -- the legendary love story that became a beloved film starring Clint Eastwood and Meryl Streep.


If you've ever experienced the one true love of your life, a love that for some reason could never be, you will understand why readers all over the world are so moved by this small, unknown first novel that they became a publishing phenomenon and #1 bestseller. The story of Robert Kincaid, the photographer and free spirit searching for the covered bridges of Madison County, and Francesca Johnson, the farm wife waiting for the fulfillment of a girlhood dream, The Bridges of Madison County gives voice to the longings of men and women everywhere -- and shows us what it is to love and be loved so intensely that life is never the same again.

The Bridges of Madison County

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The Silver Shelf

Browse by categories

Doris Lessing

Under My Skin

Doris Lessing

Walking in the Shade

Aeschylus; Robert Fagles; W. B. Stanford

The Oresteia

Silvina Ocampo; Daniel Balderston; Jorge Luis Borges; Helen Oyeyemi

Thus Were Their Faces

Elaine Scarry

The Body in Pain

Angela Carter; Salman Rushdie

Burning Your Boats

A. S. Byatt

Angels and Insects

Annie Dillard

An American Childhood

Edna O'Brien

The Country Girls: Three Novels and an Epilogue

Alice Munro

Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage

Kurt Vonnegut

Cat's Cradle

Jen George

The Babysitter at Rest

Jane Austen

Pride and Prejudice

Anna Burns

Milkman

Lauren Bacall

By Myself

Tony Kushner

Angels in America

Tony Kushner

Angels in America

Tony Kushner

Angels in America

Ted Hughes

Birthday Letters

John Irving

The World According to Garp

Damon Galgut

The Promise

Miljenko Jergovic; Russell Scott Valentino

Kin

Robert James Waller

The Bridges of Madison County

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