Julia Van Haaften

First edition. Dust jacket intact and clean text.

Heavy Hardcover (2 to 4 lbs)

Massachusetts

A Life in Photography

The comprehensive biography of the iconic twentieth-century American photographer Berenice Abbott, a trailblazing documentary modernist, author, and inventor. Berenice Abbott is to American photography as Georgia O’Keeffe is to painting or Willa Cather to letters. She was a photographer of astounding innovation and artistry, a pioneer in both her personal and professional life. Abbott’s sixty-year career established her not only as a master of American photography, but also as a teacher, writer, archivist, and inventor. Famously reticent in public, Abbott’s fascinating life has long remained a mystery—until now. In Berenice Abbott: A Life in Photography, author, archivist, and curator Julia Van Haaften brings this iconic public figure to life alongside outlandish, familiar characters from artist Man Ray to cybernetics founder Norbert Wiener. A teenage rebel from Ohio, Abbott escaped first to Greenwich Village and then to Paris—photographing, in Sylvia Beach’s words, "everyone who was anyone." As the Roaring Twenties ended, Abbott returned to New York, where she soon fell in love with art critic Elizabeth McCausland, with whom she would spend thirty years. In the 1930s, Abbott began her best-known work, Changing New York, in which she fearlessly documented the city’s metamorphosis. When warned by an older male supervisor that "nice girls" avoid the Bowery—then Manhattan’s skid row—Abbott shot back, "I’m not a nice girl. I’m a photographer…I go anywhere." This bold, feminist attitude would characterize all Abbott’s accomplishments, including imaging techniques she invented in her influential, space race–era science photography and her tenure as The New School’s first photography teacher. With more than ninety stunning photos, this sweeping, cinematic biography secures Berenice Abbott’s place in the histories of photography and modern art, while framing her incredible accomplishments as a female artist and entrepreneur.

Berenice Abbott

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Roger Lowenstein

Signed first edition. Dust jack intact and clean text.

Lincoln and His Cabinet and the Financing of the Civil War

“Captivating . . . [Lowenstein] makes what subsequently occurred at Treasury and on Wall Street during the early 1860s seem as enthralling as what transpired on the battlefield or at the White House.” —Harold Holzer, Wall Street Journal “Ways and Means, an account of the Union’s financial policies, examines a subject long overshadowed by military narratives . . . Lowenstein is a lucid stylist, able to explain financial matters to readers who lack specialized knowledge.” —Eric Foner, New York Times Book Review From renowned journalist and master storyteller Roger Lowenstein, a revelatory financial investigation into how Lincoln and his administration used the funding of the Civil War as the catalyst to centralize the government and accomplish the most far-reaching reform in the country’s history Upon his election to the presidency, Abraham Lincoln inherited a country in crisis. Even before the Confederacy’s secession, the United States Treasury had run out of money. The government had no authority to raise taxes, no federal bank, no currency. But amid unprecedented troubles Lincoln saw opportunity—the chance to legislate in the centralizing spirit of the “more perfect union” that had first drawn him to politics. With Lincoln at the helm, the United States would now govern “for” its people: it would enact laws, establish a currency, raise armies, underwrite transportation and higher education, assist farmers, and impose taxes for them. Lincoln believed this agenda would foster the economic opportunity he had always sought for upwardly striving Americans, and which he would seek in particular for enslaved Black Americans. Salmon Chase, Lincoln’s vanquished rival and his new secretary of the Treasury, waged war on the financial front, levying taxes and marketing bonds while desperately battling to contain wartime inflation. And while the Union and Rebel armies fought increasingly savage battles, the Republican-led Congress enacted a blizzard of legislation that made the government, for the first time, a powerful presence in the lives of ordinary Americans. The impact was revolutionary. The activist 37th Congress legislated for homesteads and a transcontinental railroad and involved the federal government in education, agriculture, and eventually immigration policy. It established a progressive income tax and created the greenback—paper money. While the Union became self-sustaining, the South plunged into financial free fall, having failed to leverage its cotton wealth to finance the war. Founded in a crucible of anticentralism, the Confederacy was trapped in a static (and slave-based) agrarian economy without federal taxing power or other means of government financing, save for its overworked printing presses. This led to an epic collapse. Though Confederate troops continued to hold their own, the North’s financial advantage over the South, where citizens increasingly went hungry, proved decisive; the war was won as much (or more) in the respective treasuries as on the battlefields. Roger Lowenstein reveals the largely untold story of how Lincoln used the urgency of the Civil War to transform a union of states into a nation. Through a financial lens, he explores how this second American revolution, led by Lincoln, his cabinet, and a Congress studded with towering statesmen, changed the direction of the country and established a government of the people, by the people, and for the people.

Ways and Means

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Bruce Bueno de Mesquita

Clean text and dust jacket intact. Signed by the author. First edition.

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

Popes, Kings, and the British of the West

The Invention of Power - signed by author

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Hebe UHART

Anna Vilner

Mariana Enríquez

Clean text and paper covers intact. French flaps. Translated from the Spanish by Anna Vilner. Introduction by Mariana Enriquez. Archipelago books.

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

A Question of Belonging 

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Paulina Chiziane

David Brookshaw

Clean text. Paper covers intact. French flaps. Archipelago books.
Translated from the Portuguese by David Brookshaw.

Heavy Paperback (2 to 4 lbs)

The Joyful Song of the Partridge

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John Sutherland

Clean text and dust jacket intact. Yale publisher 

Oversized Hardcover (4 to 6 lbs)

A history of fiction in 294 lives

Lives of the Novelists 

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Kathryn Harkup

The Poisons of Agatha Christie

Shortlisted for the BMA Book Awards and Macavity Awards 2016Fourteen novels. Fourteen poisons. Just because it's fiction doesn't mean it's all made-up ...Agatha Christie revelled in the use of poison to kill off unfortunate victims in her books; indeed, she employed it more than any other murder method, with the poison itself often being a central part of the novel. Her choice of deadly substances was far from random - the characteristics of each often provide vital clues to the discovery of the murderer. With gunshots or stabbings the cause of death is obvious, but this is not the case with poisons. How is it that some compounds prove so deadly, and in such tiny amounts?Christie's extensive chemical knowledge provides the backdrop for A is for Arsenic, in which Kathryn Harkup investigates the poisons used by the murderer in fourteen classic Agatha Christie mysteries. It looks at why certain chemicals kill, how they interact with the body, the cases that may have inspired Christie, and the feasibility of obtaining, administering and detecting these poisons, both at the time the novel was written and today. A is for Arsenic is a celebration of the use of science by the undisputed Queen of Crime.

A Is for Arsenic

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Clean text and dust jacket intact but with tears. See photos. Book in very good condition.  

The Portable James Joyce

Truman Capote

Clean text and dust jacket intact. Modern Library edition. 

Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

A Short Novel and Three Stories

Contains:

Breakfast at Tiffany's
House of Flowers
A Diamond Guitar
A Christmas Memory

Breakfast at Tiffany's

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Modern Library 1943 edition.  Dust jacket intact but has sun damage. See photos. Book is in very good condition.  Priced penciled in, see photo. 

The Rainbow 

Vintage book. 1899. Illustrations. Very good condition. Penciled price crossed out, see photo. 

Coffee and Repartee and the Idiot

Fofi Goffredo

Clean text and dust jacket intact. Thames & Hudson publisher 

Literary Lives in Focus

Portrait of the Writer

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Kenneth Grahame

Annie Gauger

Brian Jacques

The Annotated 

 Wind in the Willows

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Bernard MacLaverty

Clean text and dust jacket intact. First American edition

And Other Stories

A Library Journal Best Book of 2022 in Short Stories A collection of twelve powerful and moving new stories from one of Ireland's most celebrated writers.

Blank Pages

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Robin D. G. Kelley

Thelonious Monk, the life and times of an American original

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Jennifer Clement

Clean text and dust jacket intact. First edition. 

A haunting story of love and survival that introduces an unforgettable literary heroine
 
Ladydi Garcia Martínez is fierce, funny and smart. She was born into a world where being a girl is a dangerous thing. In the mountains of Guerrero, Mexico, women must fend for themselves, as their men have left to seek opportunities elsewhere. Here in the shadow of the drug war, bodies turn up on the outskirts of the village to be taken back to the earth by scorpions and snakes. School is held sporadically, when a volunteer can be coerced away from the big city for a semester. In Guerrero the drug lords are kings, and mothers disguise their daughters as sons, or when that fails they "make them ugly" - cropping their hair, blackening their teeth- anything to protect them from the rapacious grasp of the cartels. And when the black SUVs roll through town, Ladydi and her friends burrow into holes in their backyards like animals, tucked safely out of sight.
 
While her mother waits in vain for her husband's return, Ladydi and her friends dream of a future that holds more promise than mere survival, finding humor, solidarity and fun in the face of so much tragedy. When Ladydi is offered work as a nanny for a wealthy family in Acapulco, she seizes the chance, and finds her first taste of love with a young caretaker there. But when a local murder tied to the cartel implicates a friend, Ladydi's future takes a dark turn. Despite the odds against her, this spirited heroine's resilience and resolve bring hope to otherwise heartbreaking conditions.
 
An illuminating and affecting portrait of women in rural Mexico, and a stunning exploration of the hidden consequences of an unjust war, PRAYERS FOR THE STOLEN is an unforgettable story of friendship, family, and determination.

Prayers for the Stolen

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Clean text and dust jacket intact. Previous owner’s name in a pencil and price in pencil. Dust jacket has some tears. See photos. 1933

The First Wife and other stories

Clean text and dust jacket intact. Price clipped. Previous price marked in pencil. See photos. First edition. 1964

Cocktail Party for the Author 

Michael Sims

Clean text and dust jacket intact. Signed by Michael Sims. First edition. Pages aged, see photos. 

E. B. White's Eccentric Life in Nature and the Birth of an American Classic

Traces the influences of E.B. White's early 20th-century childhood on a farm and his love for animals on his career, offering insight into the creation of Charlotte's Web as it evolved from an early draft and was shaped by his scientific research and friendship with legendary editor Ursula Nordstrom. By the author of Apollo's Fire. 40,000 first printing.

The Story of Charlotte's Web - signed by author

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Teresa Carpenter

Clean text and dust jacket intact. Modern Library.

Draws on library archives, historical societies and private estates in a year-long tribute to New York that is comprised of diary entries selected from four centuries of writings by famous city natives, visitors and artists. Edited by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the best-selling Missing Beauty.

New York Diaries, 1609 To 2009

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John Updike

Clean text and dust jacket intact. Price in pencil on inside, see photo. First trade edition. 

Short Stories and a Sequel

The dozen short stories in John Updike's new collection revisit many of the locales of his fiction: the small Pennsylvania town of Olinger, the lonely farm to which the hero moves as an adolescent, the exurban New England of adult camaraderie and sexual mischief, the New York City of artistic ambition and taunting glamour. Love, including an old woman's for her cats and a boy's for his embattled father, exerts its spell in all twelve; the title derives from a story in which an American banjo virtuoso demonstrates his licks to an enthralled Soviet audience in the heart of the Cold War, while being hounded by the epistolary aftermath of a one-night stand in Washington, D.C.

To these tales Mr. Updike has added a novella-length sequel to his quartet of novels about Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom. Several old strands come at last together, and the dead man's survivors fitfully entertain his memory while pursuing their own happiness over the edge of the millennium. The place is, as before, the area of Brewer, Pennsylvania; the time, the last months of 1999.

Licks of Love

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Jhumpa Lahiri

Ann Goldstein

Clean text and paper covers intact. Signed by Lahiri

National Best Seller

On a post-college visit to Florence, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jhumpa Lahiri fell in love with the Italian language. Twenty years later, seeking total immersion, she and her family relocated to Rome, where she began to read and write solely in her adopted tongue. A startling act of self-reflection, In Other Words is Lahiri's meditation on the process of learning to express herself in another language--and the stunning journey of a writer seeking a new voice.

In Other Words

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Clean text and dust jacket intact. Dust jacket worn on upper corners and stain on inside. See photos. Singed by Lahiri 

An incisive portrait of the immigrant experience follows the Ganguli family from their traditional life in India through their arrival in Massachusetts in the late 1960s and their difficult melding into an American way of life, in a debut novel that spans three decades, two continents, and two generations. By the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Interpreter of Maladies. 150,000 first printing.

The Namesake - signed 

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Brad Gooch

A Life of Flannery O'Connor

The landscape of American literature was fundamentally changed when Flannery O'Connor stepped onto the scene with her first published book, Wise Blood, in 1952. Her fierce, sometimes comic novels and stories reflected the darkly funny, vibrant, and theologically sophisticated woman who wrote them. Brad Gooch brings to life O'Connor's significant friendships -- with Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Hardwick, Walker Percy, and James Dickey among others -- and her deeply felt convictions, as expressed in her communications with Thomas Merton, Elizabeth Bishop, and Betty Hester. Hester was famously known as "A" in O'Connor's collected letters, The Habit of Being, and a large cache of correspondence to her from O'Connor was made available to scholars, including Brad Gooch, in 2006. O'Connor's capacity to live fully -- despite the chronic disease that eventually confined her to her mother's farm in Georgia -- is illuminated in this engaging and authoritative biography.

Praise for Flannery:

"Flannery O'Connor, one of the best American writers of short fiction, has found her ideal biographer in Brad Gooch. With elegance and fairness, Gooch deals with the sensitive areas of race and religion in O'Connor's life. He also takes us back to those heady days after the war when O'Connor studied creative writing at Iowa. There is much that is new in this book, but, more important, everything is presented in a strong, clear light."-Edmund White

"This splendid biography gives us no saint or martyr but the story of a gifted and complicated woman, bent on making the best of the difficult hand fate has dealt her, whether it is with grit and humor or with an abiding desire to make palpable to readers the terrible mystery of God's grace."-Frances Kiernan, author of Seeing Mary Plain: A Life of Mary McCarthy

"A good biographer is hard to find. Brad Gooch is not merely good-he is extraordinary. Blessed with the eye and ear of a novelist, he has composed the life that admirers of the fierce and hilarious Georgia genius have long been hoping for."-Joel Conarroe, President Emeritus, John Simon Guggenheim Foundation

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