• Ford Maddox Ford - Parade's End (I guess this is his best/most famous book. It looks quit good. A tetralogy [firefox apparently doesn't know this word] here in one volume. It is quite long.
  • Auden: A Collection of Critical Essays (This comes from a series called "Twentieth Century Views", all containing crit essays about 20th Century authours. They also have very pretty covers. Also, I like Auden.)
  • Wallace Stevens : A Collection of Critical Essays
  • Ben Jonson - Bartholomew Fair (A play by an amazing Elizabethan dramatist, mostly satirical. I think this is one of his most famous, if not the most famous.)
  • William Carlos Williams - Selected Essays (Amazing collection by the poet and professor, mostly lit and art crit, mostly about poetry; it has an amazing looking cover. It's sadly written in, and not the good kind with insightful comments, but the normal, rather mindless, underlining.
  • John Dryden - All for Love (Dryden was the major writer/dramatist of the Restoration period, and this is his best play. It's a retelling/refocusing of Shakespeare's Antony & Cleopatra)
  • Jacques Derrida - Of Grammatology (The founding and preeminent text of deconstructionism, and while I am very much not a Deconstructionist, it's an entertaining read.)
  • Emerson - In His Journals (While Harold Bloom continually expounds their majesty, Emerson's 30 or so volumes of journals are a bit daunting. Hopefully this is more manageable, and with luck the selections will be picked well.)
  • Emerson - Prose and Poetry (In a strange Emerson infatuation currently, it would seem. It looked like a great selection of specific essays, more than specific poems. Unfortunately a Norton Critical Edition [I don't like criticism beside/around/on top of what ever I'm reading], but the selections are worth it.)
  • Isaac Bashevis Singer - Old Love (A collection of short stories, one of 8 apparently. I've never actually read Singer, but Bloom suggests him and he won the Nobel, so maybe there's something here. One of the stories is about two funeral workers who keep meeting the Angel of Death, which sounds amusing/strange/entertaining.)
  • Henry James - The Art of the Novel (This seems to be an overview of H.J's work by James himself, with a "preface" to each novel he wrote. I find James to be a very inconsistent and occasionally lifeless writer, but seeing a writer who is on the whole quite strong crit himself looks very interesting. Seems to be rather unknown, I had to edit it's existence into the H.J. article on Wikipedia.)
  • Cormac McCarthy - Suttree (A supposedly more funny and less violent book by McCarthy, which would be quite a change after Blood Meridian wherein I'm not sure I smiled once. Still, McCarthy is probably one of the two or three best living authours so I'm glad to have found this.)
  • Ernest Hemingway - Green Hills of Africa (A nonfiction book, basically a journal of a month of safari. Not great Hemingway, but it's good to have. A Scribner Library edition, as well, which I found particularly aesthetically pleasing.)
  • Yeats - Eleven Plays (Yeats is a significantly better poet than playwright, but I thought maybe I should read all of these anyway. He is Yeats, after all.)
  • Ambrose Bierce - The Devil's Dictionary (Probably one of the funniest books ever written. I've read it all on my Nook [it's in public domain] but I didn't actually own a physical copy. The most hilarious and sarcastic set of definitions of many random things.)
  • Goethe - Italian Journals (Essentially Goethe's travel diary of Italy, probably the easiest and most readable of most of Goethe's works. It feels almost like a current travel dialogue as he sets out into Italy and his own sets of personal woes. Translated by Auden)

These are just the books from the bookshop in Lewisburg, which shows how amazing this bookshop really was.

apr 7 2010 ∞
apr 7 2010 +