Robertson Davies

Kelly Link

Michael Dirda

Paperback Penguin Classics copy of Fifth Business by Robertson Davies

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

Oklahoma

The first book in Robertson Davies's acclaimed The Deptford Trilogy, with a new foreword by Kelly Link

Ramsay is a man twice born, a man who has returned from the hell of the battle-grave at Passchendaele in World War I decorated with the Victoria Cross and destined to be caught in a no man's land where memory, history, and myth collide. As Ramsay tells his story, it begins to seem that from boyhood, he has exerted a perhaps mystical, perhaps pernicious, influence on those around him. His apparently innocent involvement in such innocuous events as the throwing of a snowball or the teaching of card tricks to a small boy in the end prove neither innocent nor innocuous. Fifth Business stands alone as a remarkable story told by a rational man who discovers that the marvelous is only another aspect of the real.

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.

Fifth Business

850300e7-d0f6-42b9-9541-b3c2f42c22d0-1

Homer

Samuel Butler

Gilded decoration in spine has significant wear. Minor wear to gilding on rest of cover. Gilding on pages has wear typical of having been read.

Huge Hardcover (6 to 8 lbs)

South Dakota

Homer's two epics of the ancient world, The Iliad & The Odyssey, tell stories as riveting today as when they were written between the eighth and ninth century B.C. The Iliad, which tells of the siege of Troy by the Greeks, is an unforgettable tale of nations at war and of the courage and compassion heroic soldiers show upon the field of battle. The Odyssey is the story of the Greek hero Odysseus and the many marvels and challenges he encounters during his ten-year voyage home to Ithaca after the end of the Trojan War. This edition employs Samuel Butler's classic translations of both texts. The Iliad & The Odyssey is part of Barnes & Noble's series of quality leatherbound volumes. Each title in the series presents a classic work in an attractively designed edition bound in durable bonded leather. These books make elegant additions to any home library.

The Iliad and The Odyssey

f05b8363-7e91-4ba5-92f0-8aa090430317-1

Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

Ohio

This is not your father’s list of classics. In these delightful essays, Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Dirda introduces nearly ninety of the world’s most entertaining books. Writing with affection as well as authority, Dirda covers masterpieces of fantasy and science fiction, horror and adventure, as well as epics, history, essay, and children’s literature. Organized thematically, these are works that have shaped our imaginations. Love’s Mysteries moves from Sappho and Arthurian romance to Soren Kierkegaard and Georgette Heyer. In other categories Dirda discusses not only Dracula and Sherlock Holmes but also the Tao Te Ching and Icelandic sagas, Frederick Douglass and Fowler’s Modern English Usage. Whether writing about Petronius or Perelman, Dirda makes literature come alive. Classics for Pleasure is a perfect companion for any reading group or lover of books.

Classics for Pleasure

c77542be-27cb-474a-b93c-0257204598e7-1

1980's Trilogy in 1 book.  
Some wear mostly outside the book.  Pages are clean.  

We have over 3,000 books listed in all genres. 

To Save Money:
----Try the promo code in our bio
----Buy from 1 seller & shipping cost per book decreases.
----Look at our discounts

Heavy Paperback (2 to 4 lbs)

Indiana

Fifth Business; the Manticore; World of Wonders of

The complete volume of Robertson Davies's acclaimed trilogy, featuring Fifth Business, The Manticore, and World of Wonders, with a new foreword by Kelly Link 

Fifth Business
Ramsay is a man twice born, a man who has returned from the hell of the battle-grave at Passchendaele in World War I decorated with the Victoria Cross and destined to be caught in a no man's land where memory, history, and myth collide. As Ramsay tells his story, it begins to seem that from boyhood, he has exerted a perhaps mystical, perhaps pernicious, influence on those around him. His apparently innocent involvement in such innocuous events as the throwing of a snowball or the teaching of card tricks to a small boy in the end prove neither innocent nor innocuous. Fifth Business stands alone as a remarkable story told by a rational man who discovers that the marvelous is only another aspect of the real.



The Manticore
Around a mysterious death is woven a glittering, fantastical, cunningly contrived trilogy of novels. Luring the reader down labyrinthine tunnels of myth, history and magic, THE DEPTFORD TRILOGY provides an exhilarating antidote to a world from where 'the fear and dread and splendour of wonder have been banished'.

World of Wonders
This is the third novel in Davies's major work, The Deptford Trilogy. This novel tells the life story of the unfortunate boy introduced in The Fifth Business, who was spirited away from his Canadian home by one of the members of a traveling side show, the Wanless World of Wonders.

The Deptford Trilogy

b8b37420-d37d-406e-b439-6cb8de482377-1

Peter Constantine

Isaac Babel

Detached, violent, stunning. Babel was a huge influence on Michael Moorcock. X16

Paperback (1 to 2 lbs)

Arizona

Konarmiya

Using his own experiences as a journalist and propagandist with the Red Army during the war against Poland, Babel brings to life an astonishing cast of characters from the exuberant, violent era of early Soviet history: commissars and colonels, Cossacks, peasants, and shtetl-dwellers; and among them the bespectacled, Jewish writer/intellectual, observing it all and trying to figure out his role in the new Russia.".

Red Cavalry

4dc1fcb8-1038-4cd7-97f4-e60040f15603-0

Isaac Asimov

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

New York

Introduction by Michael Dirda

Isaac Asimov's seminal Foundation trilogy--one of the cornerstones of modern speculative fiction--in a single hardcover volume. Winner of the Hugo Award for Best All-Time Series.

It is the saga of the Galactic Empire, crumbling after twelve thousand years of rule. And it is the particular story of psychohistorian Hari Seldon, the only man who can see the horrors the future has in store--a dark age of ignorance, barbarism, and violence that will last for thirty thousand years. Gathering a band of courageous men and women, Seldon leads them to a hidden location at the edge of the galaxy, where he hopes they can preserve human knowledge and wisdom through the age of darkness.

In 1966, the Foundation trilogy received a Hugo Award for Best All-Time Series, and it remains the only fiction series to have been so honored. More than fifty years after their original publication, the three Foundation novels stand as classics of thrilling, provocative, and inspired world-building.

Foundation, Foundation and Empire, Second Foundation

52a3d963-4eb8-4714-b11c-e858aecb655f-1

Mary Augusta Thomas

Storrs L. Olson

Heavy Hardcover (2 to 4 lbs)

Texas

Adventures in the Smithsonian Libraries

This elegantly illustrated accompaniment to a new Smithsonian Libraries exhibition provides a three-part expedition through the collection. The book includes essays by Michael Dirda and Storrs Olson and accompanies the exhibition at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C.

An Odyssey in Print

ba55c74f-0a11-4070-bd27-82bca29aff6a-0

An Extraordinary One-Volume Literary Education

Surveying the dizzying universe of classic books, Michael Dirda, the Pulitzer Prize-winning literary essayist, proves himself to be one of the most engaging critics of our time--and great fun to read. Opening with an impassioned critique of modern reading habits, he then presents many of the great, and idiosyncratic, writers he loves most. In this showcase of one hundred of the world's most astonishing books, Dirda covers a remarkable range of literature, including popular genres such as the detective novel and ghost story, while never neglecting the deeper satisfactions of sometimes overlooked classics. Short-listed for the Los Angeles Times Book Award for criticism, Bound to Please is a glorious celebration of just how much fun reading can be.

Bound to Please

79d9a928-328d-4691-8128-a6325e000759-1

Jules Vern

Carl Bode

An adventurous geology professor mounts an expedition that descends into a subterranean world of luminous rocks, antediluvian forests, and fantastic marine life -- a living past that holds the secrets to the origins of human existence. Jules Verne's 19th-century action classic has the added appeal of a psychological quest, in which the journey is as significant as the destination.

Journey to the Center of the Earth

920cbd15-b680-4422-8c86-387f84945b38-1

Pennsylvania

Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Michael Dirda has been hailed as "the best-read person in America" (The Paris Review) and "the best book critic in America" (The New York Observer). His latest volume collects fifty of his witty and wide-ranging reflections on a life in literature. Reaching from the classics to the post-moderns, his allusions dance from Samuel Johnson, Ralph Waldo Emerson and M. F. K. Fisher to Marilynne Robinson, Hunter S. Thompson, and David Foster Wallace. Dirda's topics are equally diverse: literary pets, the lost art of cursive writing, book inscriptions, the pleasures of science fiction conventions, author photographs, novelists in old age, Oberlin College, a year in Marseille, writer's block, and much more. As admirers of his earlier books will expect, there are annotated lists galore--of perfect book titles, great adventure novels, favorite words, books about books, and beloved children's classics, as well as a revealing peek at the titles Michael keeps on his own nightstand.Funny and erudite, Browsings is a celebration of the reading life, a fan's notes, and the perfect gift for any booklover.

Browsings

e62be0c9-47bb-4cb9-ae5b-f8efb7bba689-1

Massachusetts

The first book in Robertson Davies's acclaimed The Deptford Trilogy, with a new foreword by Kelly Link Ramsay is a man twice born, a man who has returned from the hell of the battle-grave at Passchendaele in World War I decorated with the Victoria Cross and destined to be caught in a no man's land where memory, history, and myth collide. As Ramsay tells his story, it begins to seem that from boyhood, he has exerted a perhaps mystical, perhaps pernicious, influence on those around him. His apparently innocent involvement in such innocuous events as the throwing of a snowball or the teaching of card tricks to a small boy in the end prove neither innocent nor innocuous. Fifth Business stands alone as a remarkable story told by a rational man who discovers that the marvelous is only another aspect of the real. 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.

New Hampshire

Arthur Conan Doyle

(Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)

All four of Arthur Conan Doyle's legendary Sherlock Holmes novels, collected in a unique Graphic Deluxe edition with an introduction by Michael Dirda

In 1886, an unsuccessful ophthalmologist on the southern coast of England decided to try his hand at writing a detective story. Unlike his historical romances, which required the utmost care, this could be dashed off quickly. The first draft, featuring a Mr. Sherrinford Holmes, was a bit rough around the edges, but with a little revision, something astonishing emerged: Sherlock Holmes, Dr. Watson, and A Study in Scarlet. As if with no warning, they sprung forth from their creator's head, fully-formed in a new style so well-defined it felt immediately like an established genre. Their partnership cemented within pages of the book's opening-the sum of their parts accomplishing far more than they could apart. Sporting his signature billowing coat and pipe in hand, the genius investigator Holmes captivated readers with his alluring melancholy and superhuman intuition, while Watson remained ever the perfect foil, a classic Victorian gentleman with brilliant intellect.

Collected here are all four Holmes novels-A Study in Scarlet, The Sign of Four, The Hound of the Baskervilles, and The Valley of Fear-tracing the origins of the pair up through their greatest showdowns with arch-enemy Professor Moriarty. Set in the seductive shadow-world of Victorian London, they are at once an indelible portrait of their time and immortal stories unmarred by passing time. Though endlessly reinterpreted, reinvented and imitated, they have never been surpassed: the stories of Holmes and Watson lives on as immediate and original in our time as in their own.

Sherlock Holmes: the Novels

5590674c-0318-4e96-a250-56df6b36da39-1

Nevada

Sherlock Holmes: the Novels Deluxe Edition

Noticeable wear of cover and yellowing of pages (see pics). Otherwise a clean copy. 

The second book in Robertson Davies's acclaimed The Deptford Trilogy, with a new foreword by Kelly Link Hailed by the Washington Post Book World as "a modern classic," Robertson Davies’s acclaimed Deptford Trilogy is a glittering, fantastical, cunningly contrived series of novels, around which a mysterious death is woven. The Manticore—the second book in the series after Fifth Business—follows David Staunton, a man pleased with his success but haunted by his relationship with his larger-than-life father. As he seeks help through therapy, he encounters a wonderful cast of characters who help connect him to his past and the death of his father. 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 Manticore

dfc3d26a-8fb4-47b7-b561-1c8ddc36fcd3-1

Iowa

 Some wear on the very edges of the cover; otherwise in great shape.

Or, the Whole Art of Storytelling

From Pulitzer Prize–winning critic Michael Dirda, a delightful introduction to the creator of Sherlock Holmes A passionate lifelong fan of the Sherlock Holmes adventures, Pulitzer Prize–winning critic Michael Dirda is a member of The Baker Street Irregulars—the most famous and romantic of all Sherlockian groups. Combining memoir and appreciation, On Conan Doyle is a highly engaging personal introduction to Holmes's creator, as well as a rare insider’s account of the curiously delightful activities and playful scholarship of The Baker Street Irregulars. On Conan Doyle is a much-needed celebration of Arthur Conan Doyle’s genius for every kind of storytelling.

On Conan Doyle

f537643e-9c65-43e5-a0a2-6fe6c958f9c2-0

Best literary critic author. First edition, first printing.

Among the most enjoyable of literary critics, Michael Dirda combines erudition with enthusiasm, a taste for the outré and the forgotten, and a playful, understated wit. Like George Orwell or Gore Vidal, Dirda delights in popular genres, such as the detective novel and the ghost story, without neglecting the deeper satisfactions of sometimes-overlooked classics. This new work features scores of Dirda's most engaging essays, never previously collected in book form, all intended to introduce readers to wonderful writers, from the anecdotal Herodotus and James Boswell to the sensuous Colette and Steven Millhauser to such European masters as Joseph Roth, Flann O'Brien, and Penelope Fitzgerald. With his trademark enthusiasm, Dirda also explores The Arabian Nights, the spaghetti westerns of Sergio Leone, the crime novels of Chester Himes and K. C. Constantine, and the worlds of Tarzan, Cormac McCarthy, and Proust. Bound to Please is a glorious celebration of just how much fun reading can be.

1st ed./1st * Bound to Please

1b131391-961e-463c-8404-5592514efb0d-1

Aldous. Huxley

On vacation from school, Denis goes to stay at Crome, an English country house inhabitated by several of Huxley's most outlandish characters--from Mr. Barbecue-Smith, who writes 1,500 publishable words an hour by "getting in touch" with his "subconscious," to Henry Wimbush, who is obsessed with writing the definitive HISTORY OF CROME. Denis's stay proves to be a disaster amid his weak attempts to attract the girl of his dreams and the ridicule he endures regarding his plan to write a novel about love and art. Lambasting the post-Victorian standards of morality, CROME YELLOW is a witty masterpiece that, in F. Scott Fitzgerald's words, "is too irnonic to be called satire and too scornful to be called irony."

Crome Yellow

6ec3d289-b5b2-442d-924c-2c8aa08c5469-1

#paperback #fiction #sherlockholmes #deluxeeditions #penguinclassics 

Browse by categories

Save this search

Robertson Davies; Kelly Link; Michael Dirda

Fifth Business

Homer; Samuel Butler; Michael Dirda

The Iliad and The Odyssey

Michael Dirda

Classics for Pleasure

Robertson Davies; Kelly Link; Michael Dirda

The Deptford Trilogy

Peter Constantine; Isaac Babel; Michael Dirda

Red Cavalry

Isaac Asimov; Michael Dirda

Foundation, Foundation and Empire, Second Foundation

Mary Augusta Thomas; Michael Dirda; Storrs L. Olson

An Odyssey in Print

Michael Dirda

Bound to Please

Jules Vern; Carl Bode; Michael Dirda

Journey to the Center of the Earth

Michael Dirda

Browsings

Robertson Davies; Kelly Link; Michael Dirda

Fifth Business

Michael Dirda

Browsings

Arthur Conan Doyle; Michael Dirda

Sherlock Holmes: the Novels

Arthur Conan Doyle; Michael Dirda

Sherlock Holmes: the Novels Deluxe Edition

Robertson Davies; Kelly Link; Michael Dirda

The Manticore

Jules Vern; Carl Bode; Michael Dirda

Journey to the Center of the Earth

Michael Dirda

On Conan Doyle

Michael Dirda

1st ed./1st * Bound to Please

Aldous. Huxley; Michael Dirda

Crome Yellow

Arthur Conan Doyle; Michael Dirda

Sherlock Holmes: the Novels