Desiderius Erasmus

Betty Radice

A. H. T. Levi

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

Kentucky

Erasmus of Rotterdam (c. 1466-1536) is one of the greatest figures of the Renaissance humanist movement, which abandoned medieval pieties in favour of a rich new vision of the individual's potential. Praise of Folly, written to amuse his friend Sir Thomas More, is Erasmus's best-known work. Its dazzling mixture of fantasy and satire is narrated by a personification of Folly, dressed as a jester, who celebrates youth, pleasure, drunkenness and sexual desire, and goes on to lambast human pretensions, foibles and frailties, to mock theologians and monks and to praise the 'folly' of simple Christian piety. Erasmus's wit, wordplay and wisdom made the book an instant success, but it also attracted what may have been sales-boosting criticism. The Letter to Maarten van Dorp, which is a defence of his ideas and methods, is also included.

Praise of Folly

0231d3db-5f5d-428f-8c3c-34d0c0ec3037-1

Alan Lightman

Pennsylvania

Young Albert Einstein's dreams are imagined in a book that joins science and art to ponder such questions as the viscosity and flexibility of time. Reissue.

Einstein's Dreams

07467fb5-ff3c-46d1-b500-46115ce50c68-1

Carl Sagan

Mississippi

Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence

"A history of the human brain from the big bang, fifteen billion years ago, to the day before yesterday . . . It's a delight."--The New York Times

Dr. Carl Sagan takes us on a great reading adventure, offering his vivid and startling insight into the brain of man and beast, the origin of human intelligence, the function of our most haunting legends--and their amazing links to recent discoveries. 

"How can I persuade every intelligent person to read this important and elegant book? . . . He talks about all kinds of things: the why of the pain of human childbirth . . . the reason for sleeping and dreaming . . . chimpanzees taught to communicate in deaf and dumb language . . . the definition of death . . . cloning . . . computers . . . intelligent life on other planets. . . . Fascinating . . . delightful."--The Boston Globe

"In some lost Eden where dragons ruled, the foundations of our intelligence were laid. . . . Carl Sagan takes us on a guided tour of that lost land. . . . Fascinating . . . entertaining . . . masterful."--St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Dragons of Eden

088a7fa9-0282-4f4b-9b42-3753d9837747-1

1,000 Books to Read (J. Mustich)

Kjell Askildsen

Seán Kinsella

California

Stories

From one of the greatest Norwegian authors of the twentieth century, comes a collection of spare, biting stories of people caught between reality and expectation, hope and despair, love and longing.

A man and a woman in a quiet, remote house, an old man on a park bench, an estranged brother in a railway café -- Kjell Askildsen's characters are surrounded by absence. Filled with disquiet, and longing, they walk to a fjord, they smoke, they drink on a veranda, they listen to conversations that drift through open windows. Small flashes like the promise of a sunhat, a nail in a cherry tree, or a raised flag, reveal the interminable space between desire and reality in which Askildsen's characters are forever suspended. Widely recognized as one of the greatest modern short-story writers, with unadorned prose and a dark humor, Askildsen captures life as it really is, the worlds of his characters uncanny mirrors of our own.

Everything Like Before

3fe82fe0-72d1-4269-a227-f8ed3eeaecbe-1

Archipelago Books

Barbara Comyns

Kathryn Davis

Alaska

The Vet's Daughter combines shocking realism with a visionary edge. The vet lives with his bedridden wife and shy daughter Alice in a sinister London suburb. He works constantly, captive to a strange private fury, and treats his family with brutality and contempt. After his wife's death, the vet takes up with a crass, needling woman who tries to refashion Alice in her own image. And yet as Alice retreats ever deeper into a dream world, she discovers an extraordinary secret power of her own. Harrowing and haunting, like an unexpected cross between Flannery O'Connor and Stephen King, The Vet's Daughter is a story of outraged innocence that culminates in a scene of appalling triumph.

The Vet's Daughter

49773109-8e94-4eba-bc69-6d5c5cf6e7a9-1

Jane Gardam

Paperback (1 to 2 lbs)

West Virginia

Jane Gardam's marvelous stories of young girls on the threshold of womanhood--God on the Rocks and Crusoe's Daughter--have delighted fans and critics alike. These "modern classics" (The Independent) are now joined by a new novel that is equally fresh and genuine, comic and touching. Jessica Vye introduces herself with an enigmatic pronouncement: "I ought to tell you at the beginning that I am not quite normal, having had a violent experience at the age of nine." A revered author has told Jessica that she is, beyond all doubt, a born writer. This proves an accurate prediction of the future, one that indelibly colors her life at school and her preception of the world. Jessica has always known that her destiny would be shaped by her refusal to conform, her compulsion to tell the absolute truth, and her dedication to observing the strange wartime world that surrounds her. What she doesn't know, however, is that the experiences and ideas that set her apart will also lead her to a new and wholly unexpected life. Told with grace and inimitable wit, A Long Way to Verona is a wise and vivid portrait of adolescent discovery and impending adulthood.

A Long Way from Verona

609ec285-4ab1-496b-aec7-25cd560e773e-0

Diana Wynne Jones

New York

Preparing to return to college, Polly is distracted by a photograph, a supernatural story, and memories that seem unrelated to her life and enters a world of intrigue, magic, mystery, and love.

Fire and Hemlock

7443d298-5767-4392-bba9-a4fff8944bb2-1

Backlisted Podcast Books

Martin Edwards

New copy of Murder After Christmas by Rupert Latimer. 

Alabama

"[Murder After Christmas] supplies cheerfully calculating relatives, decorously brutal dialogue, and a fiendishly intricate set of Chinese boxes before the surprising reveal...no, they don't make them like this anymore."--Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review

"A war's on and a murder has been committed--and we sit here talking nonsense about almond whirls and mince pies!"

Good old Uncle Willie--known for an insatiable sweet tooth and being an epic pain in the rear--has come to stay with the Redpaths for the holidays. As luck would have it, he's found dead in the snow, in a Santa suit on Boxing Day. It seems as though someone may have poisoned his chocolate...or was it the mince pie? As the police flock to the house, Willie's descendants, past lovers and distant relatives are drawn into a perplexing investigation to find out how the old man met his fate, and who stands to gain by such an unseasonable crime.

First published in 1944, Murder After Christmas is a lively riot of murder, holiday desserts, and misdirection, cleverly twisting the tropes of Golden Age detective fiction to create a pacey, light-hearted package admirably suited for the holiday season. Featuring an introduction by CWA Diamond Dagger Award-winning author and series editor Martin Edwards.

Murder after Christmas

03ac631b-ffe3-4023-ba1d-0df0c51ffbc2-1

Mary Kelly

Florida

'The grey eyes, so apt for tragedy, looked steadily up at me. "You can't trust me, can you?" she said.' Shentall's, a long-established institution of the Staffordshire Potteries industry, is under attack. With its designs leaked to international competition and its prices undercut, private investigator Hedley Nicholson has been tasked with finding the culprit of the suspected sabotage. But, industrial espionage may just be the beginning. Delving further into the churning heart of Shentall's Pottery, Nicholson's prying is soon to unearth rumours of bonds cruelly smashed to pieces, grievances irrevocably baked in stone and a very real body, turning and turning in the liquid clay. First published in 1961, The Spoilt Kill received widespread critical acclaim and praise from contemporary crime writers such as Julian Symons. It was awarded the CWA Gold Dagger and remains a finely crafted masterpiece of the crime genre.

The Spoilt Kill

0a815a55-aac9-44f5-9fa8-f050c4b931d6-0

Richard Hull

Mystery crime fiction written in the Golden Age of Murder "This droll and inventive golden age mystery, first published in 1938, from Hull (1896-1973) offers a courtroom-based whodunit with a twist." --Publishers Weekly STARRED review 'From the point of view of the nation, it's a good thing that he died.' Great Barwick's least popular man is murdered on a train. Twelve jurors sit in court. Four suspects are identified--but which of them is on trial? This novel has all the makings of a classic murder mystery, but with a twist: as Attorney-General Anstruther Blayton leads the court through prosecution and defence, Inspector Fenby carries out his investigation. All this occurs while the identity of the figure in the dock is kept tantalisingly out of reach. Excellent Intentions is a classic crime novel laced with irreverent wit, first published in 1938.

Excellent Intentions

0be90767-ad61-4196-b20e-5ae7bb54bd56-0

British Library

If ever a subject and a writer were perfectly matched it is here.  The fated voyage of the Titanic, with its heroics and horror, has been dramatized many times before, but never by an artist with the skills and sensibility of Beryl Bainbridge.  Bainbridge vividly recreates each scene of the voyage, from the suspicious fire in the Number 10 coal bunker, to the champange and crystal of the first-class public rooms, to that terrible midnight chaos in the frigid North Atlantic.  This is remarkable, haunting tale substantiates Bainbridge as a consummate observer of the human condition.

Every Man for Himself

e7c13684-5520-4b92-8bd8-87922713dd38-1

Europa

Annie Ernaux

Tanya Leslie

Ohio

A Man’s Place

3051bf1b-5866-453c-87b7-fca64116a184-1

Jessica Au

Winner of the inaugural Novel Prize, an elegant and subtle exploration of the mysteries of our relationships to others.

Cold Enough for Snow

5b4e4dd5-55ab-41b2-8589-f7fb8ccfbf03-1

Fitzcarraldo Editions

Haunted by unspoken tensions and stifled ardor, two lovers navigate shifting expectations and societal changes in inter-war England--a decade-spanning love story from an author who is "the missing link between Jane Austen and John Updike" (The Independent)
 
The mid-twentieth century British novelist Elizabeth Taylor numbered among her admirers Elizabeth Bowen, Ivy Compton-Burnett, and Kingsley Amis. She also regularly published stories in The New Yorker for close to two decades. For all that, her work, as steely as it is delicate, remains the secret of a small number of intensely devoted readers.

The publication of her finest novel, A Game of Hide and Seek, long unavailable in the United States, should help to change that. This is an unabashed love story, capturing all the uncertainty and inevitability and deceptiveness of true love, tracking the shifting currents of emotional life, and never yielding to melodrama. Set in Britain between the wars--a time of transition between old convention and new ways--the book's heroine is Harriet, the only child of a suffragette, whom we meet as a shy and domestic and not especially smart or pretty girl. At eighteen she falls in love with Vesey, but after Vesey must go away, she marries another man, Charles, and bears a child. Then Vesey returns.

Love is at the center of the book, but so too is Taylor's extraordinary knack for depicting characters. The minor figures in the book--from Harriet's mother's friend Caroline, with her progressive politics, to Charles, his coworkers, and his mother, to Betsy with her schoolgirl crush on her Greek teacher--are as memorable as the passion and heartache of Harriet and Vesey.

A Game of Hide and Seek

030f0568-81c7-46b4-82da-992b4c3916df-1

Elaine Dundy

Terry Teachout

A smart, funny classic about a young and beautiful American woman who moves to Paris determined to live life to the fullest.

The Dud Avocado follows the romantic and comedic adventures of a young American who heads overseas to conquer Paris in the late 1950s. Edith Wharton and Henry James wrote about the American girl abroad, but it was Elaine Dundy's Sally Jay Gorce who told us what she was really thinking. Charming, sexy, and hilarious, The Dud Avocado gained instant cult status when it was first published and it remains a timeless portrait of a woman hell-bent on living. 
 
"I had to tell someone how much I enjoyed The Dud Avocado. It made me laugh, scream, and guffaw (which, incidentally, is a great name for a law firm)." -Groucho Marx
 
"[The Dud Avocado] is one of the best novels about growing up fast..." -The Guardian



The Dud Avocado

1b5f8dda-56c1-4a7b-8f6a-704e1c973ca1-1

Elizabeth Taylor

Michael Hofmann

Arizona

A blackly humorous story of loneliness, deception, and life in old age by one of the most accomplished novelists of the twentieth century.

On a rainy Sunday afternoon in January, the recently widowed Mrs. Palfrey moves to the Claremont Hotel in South Kensington. "If it's not nice, I needn't stay," she promises herself, as she settles into this haven for the genteel and the decayed.

"Three elderly widows and one old man . . . who seemed to dislike female company and seldom got any other kind" serve for her fellow residents, and there is the staff, too, and they are one and all lonely.

What is Mrs. Palfrey to do with herself now that she has all the time in the world? Go for a walk. Go to a museum. Go to the end of the block. Well, she does have her grandson who works at the British Museum, and he is sure to visit any day.

Mrs. Palfrey prides herself on having always known "the right thing to do," but in this new situation she discovers that resource is much reduced. Before she knows it, in fact, she tries something else.

Elizabeth Taylor's final and most popular novel is as unsparing as it is, ultimately, heartbreaking.

Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont

a5f3d5ea-4e95-42f5-a792-b33f365724f6-1

NYRB

Thea Holme

Persephone Book, mild wear and tear from reading

Massachusetts

The Carlyles at Home

47c2a2e5-028d-4f14-8cb8-95d5d41eff4f-0

Mollie Panter-Downes

Heavy Paperback (2 to 4 lbs)

This is a firsthand account of the British civilian experience of World War II, written as it was happening. The entries are spaced about every two weeks, from September 3rd, 1939 until May 12th, 1945.

London War Notes

68bfd21f-ffc2-48d8-a6fe-136b5f50f180-1

Persephone Books

In 1914, when Nicandra is eight, all is well in the grand Irish estate, Deer Forest. Maman is beautiful and adored. Dada, silent and small, mooches contendedly around the stables. Aunt Tossie, of the giant heart and bosom, is widowed but looks splendid in weeds. The butler, the groom, the landsteward, the maids, the men - each as a place and knows it. Then, astonishingly, the perfect surface is shattered; Maman does something too dreadful ever to be spoken of.
'What next? Who to love?' asks Nicaranda. And through her growing up and marriage her answer is to swamp those around her with kindness - while gradually the great house crumbles under a weight of manners and misunderstanding.

Loving and Giving

194f91a1-834d-4536-b5b4-d4342e23d3e1-1

Jane and Prudence

23574a94-5f94-46fc-ad9e-b9e866efb3b4-1

Antonia White

Oklahoma

'Frost in May is the unsurpassed novel of convent school life. This story of a clash between a determined young girl and an authoritarian regime is both perceptive and painfully emotional, convincing in every detail' - Hermione Lee, Observer With a new introduction by Tessa Hadley Nanda Gray, the daughter of a Catholic convert, is nine when she is sent to the Convent of Five Wounds. Quick-witted, resilient and eager to please, she accepts this closed world where, with all the enthusiasm of the outsider, her desires and passions become only those the school permits. Her only deviation from total obedience is the passionate friendships she makes. Convent life is perfectly captured - the smell of beeswax and incense; the petty cruelties of the nuns; the eccentricities of Nanda's school friends. Books in the VMC 40th anniversary series include: Frost in May by Antonia White; The Collected Stories of Grace Paley; Fire from Heaven by Mary Renault; The Magic Toyshop by Angela Carter; The Weather in the Streets by Rosamond Lehmann; Deep Water by Patricia Highsmith; The Return of the Soldier by Rebecca West; Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston; Heartburn by Nora Ephron; The Dud Avocado by Elaine Dundy; Memento Mori by Muriel Spark; A View of the Harbour by Elizabeth Taylor and Faces in the Water by Janet Frame

Frost in May

359056a7-1668-4442-9efc-bedd925c3732-1

Virago Modern Classics

Amy Collard

North Carolina

Browse by categories

Shelves by Amy Collard