Bellow The Actual

Amis, Martin. EXPERIENCE: A MEMOIR Scarce Signed Copy of The First American Edition. New York City, NY: Hyperion Books, 2000.
Hardcover. First Edition. First Printing. 406 pages. As New in As New Dust Jacket. The author's debut memoir. The first appearance of the title in the United States. Precedes and should not be confused with all other subsequent editions. One of the most widely-anticipated literary memoirs of the new century, it sheds light on the writer-as-celebr ity. "If you're looking for his take on controversies, you won't be disappointed. In fact, you should turn right away to the end of the book. After all, how many memoirs have indices, and how many indices are this entertaining? In addition to movers and shakers like Travolta, John, Brown, Tina, and Bellow, Saul, one finds an extended entry for dental problems, sexual potency, and tumor. Organized not by chronology but by a thematic schema all Amis' own, this tangential book moves backward and forward in time and comes studded with footnotes and interspersed with schoolboy epistles. As a result, it's much truer to the actual texture of experience than anything more novelistic could possibly be. This is memoir as anatomy of obsessions, and in the most profound way, it illuminates the source and power of Amis' remarkable work" (Mary Park). A "must-have" title for Martin Amis collectors. <b><i> This copy is prominently, neatly, and beautifully signed in black pen on the title page by Martin Amis. This title has been out-of-print as a hardcover for a long time even though it went into subsequent printing. This is one of relatively few signed copies of the First American Edition still available online and has no flaws, a pristine beauty. A very scarce signed copy thus. </b></i> Shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2003 for "Yellow Dog". One of the most brilliant living British writers. A flawless copy. (SEE ALSO OTHER MARTIN AMIS TITLES IN OUR CATALOG). ISBN 0786866527. Signed by Author.

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Bellow, Saul: RAVELSTEIN, New York Viking Adult 2000
067084134X New Condition

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Saul Bellow confined himself to shorter fictions. Not that this old master ever dabbled in minimalism: novellas such as The Actual and The Bellarosa Connection are bursting at the seams with wit, plot, and the intellectual equivalent of high fiber. Still, Bellow's readers wondered if he would ever pull another full-sized novel from his hat. With Ravelstein, the author has done just that--and he proves that even in his ninth decade, he can pin a character to the page more vividly, and more permanently, than just about anybody on the planet. Character is very much the issue in Ravelstein, whose eponymous subject is a thinly disguised version of Bellow's boon companion, the late Allan Bloom. Like Bloom, Abe Ravelstein has spent much of his career at the University of Chicago, fighting a rearguard action against the creeping boobism and vulgarity of American life. What's more, he's written a surprise bestseller (a ringer, of course, for The Closing of the American Mind), which has made him into a millionaire. And finally, he's dying--has died of AIDS, in fact, six years before the opening of the novel. What we're reading, then, is a faux memoir by his best friend and anointed Boswell, a Bellovian body-double named Chick: Ravelstein was willing to lay it all out for me. Now why did he bother to tell me such things, this large Jewish man from Dayton, Ohio? Because it very urgently needed to be said. He was HIV-positive, he was dying of complications from it. Weakened, he became the host of an endless list of infections. Still, he insisted on telling me over and over again what love was--the neediness, the awareness of incompleteness, the longing for wholeness, and how the pains of Eros were joined to the most ecstatic pleasures. Ravelstein is a little thin in the plot department--or more accurately, it has an anti-plot, which consists of Chick's inability to write his memoir. But seldom has a case of writer's block been so supremely productive. The narrator dredges up anecdote after anecdote about his subject, assembling a composite portrait: "In approaching a man like Ravelstein, a piecemeal method is perhaps best." We see this very worldly philosopher teaching, kvetching, eating, drinking, and dying, the last in melancholic increments. His death, and Chick's own brush with what Henry James called "the distinguished thing," give much of the novel a kind of black-crepe coloration. But fortunately, Bellow shares Ravelstein's "Nietzschean view, favorable to comedy and bandstands," and there can't be many eulogies as funny as this one. As always, the author is lavish with physical detail, bringing not only his star but a large gallery of minor players to rude and resounding life ("Rahkmiel was a non-benevolent Santa Claus, a dangerous person, ruddy, with a red-eyed scowl and a face in which the anger muscles were highly developed"). His sympathies are also stretched in some interesting directions by his homosexual protagonist. Bellow hasn't, to be sure, transformed himself into an affirmative-action novelist. But his famously capacious view of human nature has been enriched by this additional wrinkle: "In art you become familiar with due process. You can't simply write people off or send them to hell." A world-class portrait, a piercing intimation of mortality, Ravelstein is truly that other distinguished thing: a great novel. --James Marcus From Publishers Weekly Age does not wither Saul Bellow. The 84-year-old writer's new novel is echt Bellow--the grab-bag paragraphs stuffed with truculent observations; the comedic mix of admiration and rivalry that subtends the friendships of intellectual men; the impossible and possible wives. Abe Ravelstein, a professor at a well-known Midwestern college, is obviously modeled on the late Allan Bloom. Published at twenty five dollars. Hardcover 6 x 9"

[SW: 20TH CENTURY AMERICAN FICTION, LITERATURE NOBEL PRIZE WINNERS, SAUL BELLOW]

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Bellow, Saul. THE ACTUAL Scarce Copy of The First Hardcover Edition. New York City, NY: Viking Press, 1997.
Hardcover. First Edition. First Printing. 104 pages. As New in As New Dust Jacket. The most recent installment in a sweet and nimble run of fine novellas. The First Hardcover Edition. Precedes and should not be confused with all other susbequent editions. Witty, tenderly humorous, and wise, this is late-Bellow, a much-discussed and still-controv ersial aspect of the writer's oeuvre. There are those who believe Bellow's powers as a writer declined in old age and those who strongly feel otherwise, that in his run of novellas, essays, short stories, and novels, he actually became more nimble and assured. Saul Bellow was a notoriously difficult man, which both admirers and detractors attributed to his lifelong insecurities as a writer, despite his incredible achievements. A "must-have" title for Saul Bellow collectors. <B><i> This title has been out-of-print as a hardcover for a long time and is now collectible. This is one of few copeis of the First Hardcover Edition still available online and has no flaws, a pristine beauty. A scarce copy thus. </b></i> Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1976 and The National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Literature in 1990. One of the greatest American writers of the 20th century. A flawless copy. (SEE ALSO OTHER SAUL BELLOW TITLES IN OUR CATALOG).

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Oates, Joyce Carol (editor) (Washington Irving; William Austin; Nathaniel Hawthorne; Herman Melville; Edgar Allan Poe; Harriet Beecher Stowe; Samuel Clemens; Sarah Orne Jewett; Kate Chopin; Charles Chesnutt; Charlotte Perkins Gilman; Henry James): THE OXFORD BOOK OF AMERICAN SHORT STORIES: Rip Van Winkle; Peter Rugg the Missing Man; The Wives of the Dead; The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids; The Tell Tale Heart; The Ghost in the Mill; Cannibalism in the Cars; A White Heron, New York Oxford Paperbacks - Oxford University Press 1992
0195092627 Very Good Winslow Homer;

(xiv) 768 pp. Lightly rubbed on the corners with an uncreased spine; no interior markings. The cover features The New Novel by Winslow Homer. This anthology contains: Rip Van Winkle by Washington Irving; Peter Rugg the Missing Man by William Austin; The Wives of the Dead by Nathaniel Hawthorne; The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids by Herman Melville; The Tell Tale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe; The Ghost in the Mill by Harriet Beecher Stowe; Cannibalism in the Cars by Mark Twain - Samuel Clemens; A White Heron by Sarah Orne Jewett; The Storm by Kate Chopin; The Sheriff's Children by Charles Chesnutt; The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman; The Middle Years by Henry James; In a Far Country by Jack London; Old Woman Magoun by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman; The Little Regiment by Stephen Crane; A Journey by Edith Wharton; The Strength of God by Sherwood Anderson; A Death in the Desert by Willa Cather; Blood Burning Moon by Jean Toomer; A Clean Well Lighted Place by Ernest Hemingway; An Alcoholic Case by F. Scott Fitzgerald; The Girl with a Pimply Face by William Carlos Williams; He by Katherine Anne Porter; That Evening Sun by William Faulkner; Sweat by Zora Neale Hurston; Red Headed Baby by Langston Hughes; The Man Who Was Almost a Man by Richard Wright; A Distant Episode by Paul Bowles; A Late Encounter with the Enemy by Flannery O'Connor; Sonny's Blues by James Baldwin; Battle Royal by Ralph Ellison; There Will Come Soft Rains by Ray Bradbury; Rain in the Heart by Peter Taylor; Where is the Voice Coming From by Eudora Welty; The Lecture by Isaac Bashevis Singer; My Son the Murderer by Bernard Malamud; Something to Remember Me By by Saul Bellow; The Death of Justina by John Cheever; Texts by Ursula K. Le Guin; The School by Donald Barthelme; The Persistence of Desire by John Updike; Alaska by Alice Adams; Are These Actual Miles by Raymond Carver; Yellow Woman by Leslie Marmon Silko; The Shawl by Cynthia Ozick; Heat by Joyce Carol Oates; Hunters in the Snow by Tobias Wolff; The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien; Big Bertha Stories by Bobbie Ann Mason; Fever by John Edgar Wideman; The Management of Grief by Bharati Mukherjee; Two Kinds by Amy Tan; Fleur by Louise Erdrich; Gravity by David Leavitt; The House on Mango Street; What Sally Said; Linoleum Roses; and A House of My Own by Sandra Cisneros; and Town Smokes by Pinckney Benedict. First Softcover Edition Trade Paperback 8vo

[SW: american writing;]

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