R. A. Griffiths

Front cover bent at corner, few stains otherwise great condition 

Heavy Paperback (2 to 4 lbs)

New York

A study of the entire span of Hing Henry VI's reign, from 1422 to 1461, in the SUTTON HISTORY PAPERBACKS series.

The Reign of King Henry VI

ed514233-a277-4a31-ac23-4cf94c359835-1

Max Frisch

Slight stains on t page edges, clean inside 

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

Loneliness and despair invade the world of an engineer who comes to realize that he has failed as a friend, husband, and father.

Homo Faber

8021abc1-c6ae-4e69-8924-dd2472f95816-0

1992 Harlequin paperback, perfect but for yellowing pages

Welcome to Tyler #5

Blazing Star

Completely intact vintage paperback, no creases or marks.  Just yellowing paper.

A literary feast from the Beautiful Couple of the Jazz Age-22 uncollected stories

Bits of Paradise

Ana María Matute

Elaine Kerrigan

A Spanish writer's approach by the intimist route to the still unassuaged griefs of the Civil War...What happens is that the protected bourgeois world in which it is possible to go on with the pretext of childishness at fourteen is split open by the realities of war, or, rather, the realities of which the war is the expression.

School of the Sun

e13ea917-3b5e-4872-beea-9185f71c0aab-0

George Saunders

Strange wear on the inner cover, cover a little damaged, pages pristine 

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • WINNER OF THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE The “devastatingly moving” (People) first novel from the author of Tenth of December: a moving and original father-son story featuring none other than Abraham Lincoln, as well as an unforgettable cast of supporting characters, living and dead, historical and invented Named One of Paste’s Best Novels of the Decade • Named One of the Ten Best Books of the Year by The Washington Post, USA Today, and Maureen Corrigan, NPR • One of Time’s Ten Best Novels of the Year • A New York Times Notable Book • One of O: The Oprah Magazine’s Best Books of the Year February 1862. The Civil War is less than one year old. The fighting has begun in earnest, and the nation has begun to realize it is in for a long, bloody struggle. Meanwhile, President Lincoln’s beloved eleven-year-old son, Willie, lies upstairs in the White House, gravely ill. In a matter of days, despite predictions of a recovery, Willie dies and is laid to rest in a Georgetown cemetery. “My poor boy, he was too good for this earth,” the president says at the time. “God has called him home.” Newspapers report that a grief-stricken Lincoln returns, alone, to the crypt several times to hold his boy’s body. From that seed of historical truth, George Saunders spins an unforgettable story of familial love and loss that breaks free of its realistic, historical framework into a supernatural realm both hilarious and terrifying. Willie Lincoln finds himself in a strange purgatory where ghosts mingle, gripe, commiserate, quarrel, and enact bizarre acts of penance. Within this transitional state—called, in the Tibetan tradition, the bardo—a monumental struggle erupts over young Willie’s soul. Lincoln in the Bardo is an astonishing feat of imagination and a bold step forward from one of the most important and influential writers of his generation. Formally daring, generous in spirit, deeply concerned with matters of the heart, it is a testament to fiction’s ability to speak honestly and powerfully to the things that really matter to us. Saunders has invented a thrilling new form that deploys a kaleidoscopic, theatrical panorama of voices to ask a timeless, profound question: How do we live and love when we know that everything we love must end? “A luminous feat of generosity and humanism.”—Colson Whitehead, The New York Times Book Review “A masterpiece.”—Zadie Smith

Lincoln in the Bardo

68bb3c39-2abc-410c-8ba9-e00f78363d2e-1

Jonathan Franzen

Cover scuffed, used, completely intact, no marks

Paperback (1 to 2 lbs)

A Novel

Enid Lambert begins to worry about her husband when he starts to withdraw and lose himself in negativity and depression as he faces Parkinson's disease. Winner of the National Book Award. Reprint. 500,000 first printing.

The Corrections

412c6e14-08b5-410f-8d4a-d2899b037546

Vintage paperback, slightly damaged cover, one dog eared page, yellowed pages

The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster 

Brian Dillon

A captivating meditation on the power of the sentence by the author of Essayism, a 2018 New Yorker book of the year. In Suppose a Sentence, Brian Dillon, whom John Banville has called “a literary flâneur in the tradition of Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin,” has written a sequel of sorts to Essayism, turning his attention to the oblique and complex pleasures of the sentence. A series of essays prompted by a single sentence—from Shakespeare to James Baldwin, John Ruskin to Joan Didion—this new book explores style, voice, and language, along with the subjectivity of reading. Both an exercise in practical criticism and a set of experiments or challenges, Suppose a Sentence is a polemical and personal reflection on the art of the sentence in literature.

Suppose a Sentence

eb1684bb-cfca-4b89-ae2f-6fe87eef6ebb-0

Jacqueline Woodson

Perfect except for a slight dent in the cover

A Finalist for the 2016 National Book Award New York Times Bestseller The acclaimed New York Times bestselling and National Book Award–winning author of Brown Girl Dreaming delivers her first adult novel in twenty years. Running into a long-ago friend sets memory from the 1970s in motion for August, transporting her to a time and a place where friendship was everything—until it wasn’t. For August and her girls, sharing confidences as they ambled through neighborhood streets, Brooklyn was a place where they believed that they were beautiful, talented, brilliant—a part of a future that belonged to them. But beneath the hopeful veneer, there was another Brooklyn, a dangerous place where grown men reached for innocent girls in dark hallways, where ghosts haunted the night, where mothers disappeared. A world where madness was just a sunset away and fathers found hope in religion. Like Louise Meriwether’s Daddy Was a Number Runner and Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina, Jacqueline Woodson’s Another Brooklyn heartbreakingly illuminates the formative time when childhood gives way to adulthood—the promise and peril of growing up—and exquisitely renders a powerful, indelible, and fleeting friendship that united four young lives.

Another Brooklyn

648e2af1-0b3e-4033-8e0e-a9d9780d2f0c-1

Old Library book, a little damaged but totally intact 

Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

A Musical 

West Side Story

John Horvath

Lavonne Mueller

Jack Temchin

Michael Howard

Best Scenes for the 90's

Offers a wide range of age, genre, and character choices for each duo scene.

Duo!

a516c145-79a0-426c-b9c7-836f350b286c-0

Antonia Fraser

Worn cover otherwise perfect, text with color and black and white plates 

The Journey

Describes the life of Marie Antionette from her betrothal as a fourteen-year-old girl to the future King Louis XVI, through her life in the French court, to her courage in the face of revolutionaries who sent her to the guillotine.

Marie Antoinette

77f4cfbc-4bda-4c19-ae33-382c302a6ce0-1

Worn cover with a slight tearing otherwise perfect 

Or Ramses The Damined

The Mummy

W. Wilkie Collins

The Woman in White

d452b79c-7e11-475a-9c26-34acbf3a7ceb-1

Perfect except for slightly yellowing pages 

"A book that will leave few readers unmoved."-San Francisco Chronicle

She was the quintessential queen: statuesque, regal, dazzlingly beautiful. Her royal birth gave her claim to the thrones of two nations; her marriage to the young French dauphin promised to place a third glorious crown on her noble head.

Instead, Mary Stuart became the victim of her own impulsive heart, scandalizing her world with a foolish passion that would lead to abduction, rape and even murder. Betrayed by those she most trusted, she would be lured into a deadly game of power, only to lose to her envious and unforgiving cousin, Elizabeth I. Here is her story, a queen who lost a throne for love, a monarch pampered and adored even as she was led to her beheading, the unforgettable woman who became a legend for all time.

Praise for Mary Queen of Scots

"She was sometimes reviled as a scheming whore, sometimes revered as a misunderstood martyr. But she was invariably regarded as fascinating. Antonia Fraser's richly readable biography demonstrates that Mary's great fascination continues unabated."--Time

"Compassionate, illuminating, rich in human interest."--The New York Times 

"One of the most fascinating figures in history." --The Columbus Dispatch 

"With grace, sensitivity, and a sharp eye for detail, lady Antonia Fraser has succeeded not only in recapturing the real Mary from the symbol but also in illuminating the chaotic age in which she lived."--Newsweek

Mary Queen of Scots

15063c6d-41ab-473f-bc84-590dae50a350-1

Deepti Kapoor

This is the age of vice, where money, pleasure, and power are everything,
and the family ties that bind can also kill.
 
New Delhi, 3 a.m. A speeding Mercedes jumps the curb and in the blink of an eye, five people are dead. It's a rich man's car, but when the dust settles there is no rich man at all, just a shell-shocked servant who cannot explain the strange series of events that led to this crime. Nor can he foresee the dark drama that is about to unfold.

Deftly shifting through time and perspective in contemporary India, Age of Vice is an epic, action-packed story propelled by the seductive wealth, startling corruption, and bloodthirsty violence of the Wadia family -- loved by some, loathed by others, feared by all.

In the shadow of lavish estates, extravagant parties, predatory business deals and calculated political influence, three lives become dangerously intertwined: Ajay is the watchful servant, born into poverty, who rises through the family's ranks. Sunny is the playboy heir who dreams of outshining his father, whatever the cost. And Neda is the curious journalist caught between morality and desire. Against a sweeping plot fueled by loss, pleasure, greed, yearning, violence and revenge, will these characters' connections become a path to escape, or a trigger of further destruction? 

Equal parts crime thriller and family saga, transporting readers from the dusty villages of Uttar Pradesh to the urban energy of New Delhi, Age of Vice is an intoxicating novel of gangsters and lovers, false friendships, forbidden romance, and the consequences of corruption. It is binge-worthy entertainment at its literary best.

Age of Vice

abaa1e39-6031-4b5c-81d6-7b2b2288e804-1

Jamil Jan Kochai

FINALIST FOR THE 2022 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION

NAMED ONE OF THE NEW YORKER'S BEST BOOKS OF 2022

"An endlessly inventive and moving collection from a thrilling and capacious young talent." --Jess Walter, author of Beautiful Ruins.

A luminous new collection of stories from a young writer who "has brought his culture's rich history, mythology, and lyricism to American letters." --Sandra Cisneros

Pen/Hemingway finalist Jamil Jan Kochai breathes life into his contemporary Afghan characters, moving between modern-day Afghanistan and the Afghan diaspora in America. In these arresting stories verging on both comedy and tragedy, often starring young characters whose bravado is matched by their tenderness, Kochai once again captures "a singular, resonant voice, an American teenager raised by Old World Afghan storytellers."*

In "Playing Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain," a young man's video game experience turns into a surreal exploration on his own father's memories of war and occupation. Set in Kabul, "Return to Sender" follows two married doctors driven by guilt to leave the US and care for their fellow Afghans, even when their own son disappears. A college student in the US in "Hungry Ricky Daddy" starves himself in protest of Israeli violence against Palestine. And in the title story, "The Haunting of Hajji Hotak," we learn the story of a man codenamed Hajji, from the perspective of a government surveillance worker, who becomes entrenched in the immigrant family's life.

The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories is a moving exploration of characters grappling with the ghosts of war and displacement--and one that speaks to the immediate political landscape we reckon with today.

*The New York Times Book Review

The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories

40cc17ad-0816-4104-9e4b-6ee2ffef0a5b-1

William Davies

Excellent condition except for 4 pages with underlining and notes

Democracy and the Decline of Reason

In this age of intense political conflict, we sense objective fact is growing less important. Experts are attacked as partisan, statistics and scientific findings are decried as propaganda, and public debate devolves into personal assaults. How did we get here, and what can we do about it? In this sweeping and provocative work, political economist William Davies draws on a four-hundred-year history of ideas to reframe our understanding of the contemporary world. He argues that global trends decades and even centuries in the making have reduced a world of logic and fact into one driven by emotions—particularly fear and anxiety. This has ushered in an age of “nervous states,” both in our individual bodies and our body politic. Eloquently tracing the history of accounting, statistics, science, and human anatomy from the Enlightenment to the present, Davies shows how we invented expertise in the seventeenth century to calm the violent disputes—over God and the nature of reality—that ravaged Europe. By separating truth from emotion, scientific, testable facts paved a way out of constant warfare and established a basis for consensus, which became the bedrock of modern politics, business, and democracy. Informed by research on psychology and economics, Davies reveals how widespread feelings of fear, vulnerability, physical and psychological pain, and growing inequality reshaped our politics, upending these centuries-old ideals of how we understand the world and organize society. Yet Davies suggests that the rise of emotion may open new possibilities for confronting humanity’s greatest challenges. Ambitious and compelling, Nervous States is a perceptive and enduring account of our turbulent times.

Nervous States

635c1a9c-1167-400a-b989-0523264b307e-0

Mandy-Suzanne Wong

The Box

f2ea0039-b034-4428-a36e-2872d62107fe-0

Alexandra Horowitz

Little water damage on a few pages, otherwise great condition, a few illustrations and color plates 

A Walker's Guide to the Art of Observation

From the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Inside of a Dog, this "elegant and entertaining" (The Boston Globe) explanation of how humans perceive their environments "does more than open our eyes...opens our hearts and minds, too, gently awakening us to a world--in fact, many worlds--we've been missing" (USA TODAY).

Alexandra Horowitz shows us how to see the spectacle of the ordinary--to practice, as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle put it, "the observation of trifles." Structured around a series of eleven walks the author takes, mostly in her Manhattan neighborhood, On Looking features experts on a diverse range of subjects, including an urban sociologist, the well-known artist Maira Kalman, a geologist, a physician, and a sound designer. Horowitz also walks with a child and a dog to see the world as they perceive it. What they see, how they see it, and why most of us do not see the same things reveal the startling power of human attention and the cognitive aspects of what it means to be an expert observer.

Page by page, Horowitz shows how much more there is to see--if only we would really look. Trained as a cognitive scientist, she discovers a feast of fascinating detail, all explained with her generous humor and self-deprecating tone. So turn off the phone and other electronic devices and be in the real world--where strangers communicate by geometry as they walk toward one another, where sounds reveal shadows, where posture can display humility, and the underside of a leaf unveils a Lilliputian universe--where, indeed, there are worlds within worlds within worlds.

On Looking

940bc5f7-6dbd-400a-8ad8-1d02f0a6edb6-1

Anaïs Nin

Erotica

The inspiration for the six-part series "Little Birds" from Sophia Al-Maria.



These thirteen erotic short stories by the acclaimed author of Henry and June explore the nature of desire, taboo, and female sensuality.

From the beach towns of Normandy to the streets of New Orleans, these thirteen vignettes introduce us to a covetous French painter, a sleepless wanderer of the night, a guitar-playing gypsy, and a host of others who yearn for and dive into the turbulent depths of romantic experience.



"[It is] so distinct an advance in the depiction of female sensuality that I felt, on reading it, enormous gratitude."--Alice Walker



"One of contemporary literature's most important writers.--Newsweek

Little Birds

87a77aaa-8fea-4c4e-8bb5-fb10ef100ea9-1

Yoko Tawada

Susan Bernofsky

Cut on front cover stopping before the first chapter, used book, underlining in about 10%, very readable 

The Memoirs of a Polar Bear has in spades what Rivka Galchen hailed in the New Yorker as "Yoko Tawada's magnificent strangeness"--Tawada is an author like no other. Three generations (grandmother, mother, son) of polar bears are famous as both circus performers and writers in East Germany: they are polar bears who move in human society, stars of the ring and of the literary world. In chapter one, the grandmother matriarch in the Soviet Union accidentally writes a bestselling autobiography. In chapter two, Tosca, her daughter (born in Canada, where her mother had emigrated) moves to the DDR and takes a job in the circus. Her son--the last of their line--is Knut, born in chapter three in a Leipzig zoo but raised by a human keeper in relatively happy circumstances in the Berlin zoo, until his keeper, Matthias, is taken away...

Happy or sad, each bear writes a story, enjoying both celebrity and "the intimacy of being alone with my pen."

Browse by categories

R. A. Griffiths

The Reign of King Henry VI

Max Frisch

Homo Faber

Suzanne Ellison

Blazing Star

F. Scott & Zelda Fitzgerald

Bits of Paradise

Ana María Matute; Elaine Kerrigan

School of the Sun

George Saunders

Lincoln in the Bardo

Jonathan Franzen

The Corrections

Richard Brautigan

The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster

Brian Dillon

Suppose a Sentence

Jacqueline Woodson

Another Brooklyn

Arthur Laurents

West Side Story

John Horvath; Lavonne Mueller; Jack Temchin; Michael Howard

Duo!

Antonia Fraser

Marie Antoinette

Anne Rice

The Mummy

W. Wilkie Collins

The Woman in White

Antonia Fraser

Mary Queen of Scots

Deepti Kapoor

Age of Vice

Jamil Jan Kochai

The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories

William Davies

Nervous States

Mandy-Suzanne Wong

The Box

Alexandra Horowitz

On Looking

Anaïs Nin; Anaïs Nin

Little Birds

Yoko Tawada translation by Susan Bernofsky

The Memoirs of a Polar Bear

Edited by Margaret Obank

Banipal 46 Spring 2013

Get The App