Search Results: Modern Literature from Shop-books.ca

Harper, Toronto, 2009. Later printing. Condition: Very good plus, light edge wear, corner bumping and creasing.After a long and eventful life, Allan Karlsson ends up in a nursing home, believing it to be his last stop. The only problem is that he's still in good health. A big celebration is in the works for his 100th birthday, but Allan really isn't interested (and he'd like a bit more control over his alcohol consumption), so he decides to escape. He climbs out the window in his slippers and embarks on a hilarious and entirely unexpected journey. It would be the adventure of a lifetime for anyone else, but Allan has a larger-than-life backstory: he has not only witnessed some of the most important events of the 20th century, but actually played a key role in them...

Vintage, New York. 4th trade paperback printing. Condition: Near fine, very light edge and corner wear.If Charles Dickens has written speculative fiction, he might have created a novel as intricate, passionate, and lacerating as Thomas M. Disch's visionary portrait of the underbelly of 21st-century New York City. The residents of the public housing project at 334 East 11th Street live in a world of rationed babies and sanctioned drug addiction. Real food is displayed in museums and hospital attendants moonlight as body-snatchers.Nimbly hopscotching backward and forward in time, Disch charts the shifting relationships between this world's inheritors: an aging matriarch who falls in love with her young social worker; a widow seeking comfort from the spirit of her dead husband; a privileged preteen choreographing the perfectly gratuitous murder. Poisonously funny, piercingly authentic, 334 is a masterpiece of social realism disguised as science fiction.

McClelland & Stewart, Toronto, 1999. First edition. Condition: Book has light corner bumps and edge wear, dust jacket has light creasing and edge wear, especially along spine.Amriika is a novel of betrayal, disillusionment, and discovery set in America during three highly charged decades in the nation's history. In the late sixties, Ramji, a student from Dar es Salaam, East Africa, arrives in an America far different from the one he dreamed about, one caught up in anti-war demonstrations, revolutionary lifestyles, and spiritual quests. As Ramji finds himself pulled by the tumultuous currents of those troubled times, he is swept up in events whose consequences will haunt him for years to come. Decades later in a changed America, having recently left a marriage and a suburban existence, an older Ramji, passionately in love, finds himself drawn into a set of circumstances which hold terrifying reminders of the past and its unanswered questions.

Picador, New York, 2003. First edition. Condition: Very good plus softcover, light edge nicks and creasing at spine.From the publisher: Born of god and king and hidden as a girl until Odysseus discovers him, Achilles becomes the Greeks' greatest warrior at Troy. Into his story comes a cast of fascinating characters among them Hector, Helen, Penthiselaia the Amazon Queen, and the centaur Chiron; and finally John Keats, whose writings form the basis of a meditation on the nature of identity and shared experience. Achilles is an affirmation of the story's enduring power to reach across centuries and cultures to the core of our imagination.

Condition: Very good, edge wear and corner bumps, spine creasing. corner crease at top rear cover, light scuffing.Poetry, short fiction, photography by Elaine Yau, Tony Esolen, Thomas Mackay, Hans Straub, Stephen Pender, Margraet Wigglesworth, Carol Ashton, Chris D'Iorio, Antonino Mazza, David K. Fujino and others, and an interview with John Reibetanz.

Condition: Very good, edge wear and corner bumps, spine creasing. slight sunning on white background, light scuffing on rear cover.Poetry, short fiction, photography by Chris D'Iorio, Jacques Servin, Gerry Stewart, Kate Manahan, Katie Jaimet, Louise Allin, Cornelia Hornosty, Robert Martin, David K. Fujino and others, and an interview with Robert Fulfod.

Gollancz, London, 2014. First trade paperback edition. Condition: Near fine, very light edge and corner wear.In the near future, Tibor Tarent, a freelance photographer, is recalled from Anatolia to Britain when his wife, an aid worker, is killed—annihilated by a terrifying weapon that reduces its target to a triangular patch of scorched earth. A century earlier, Tommy Trent, a stage magician, is sent to the Western Front on a secret mission to render British reconnaissance aircraft invisible to the enemy.Present day. A theoretical physicist develops a new method of diverting matter, a discovery with devastating consequences that will resonate through time.

Black Sparrow Press, Santa Rosa CA, 1995. 2nd trade paperback printing. Condition: Near fine, very light edge and corner wear.A critical review of the work of Charles Bukowski.

Vintage, New York. 6th trade paperback printing. Condition: Very good, light edge wear and corner bumps, light nicks at spine ends.Transform your life. Rewrite your destiny.In his most personal novel to date, internationally best-selling author Paulo Coelho returns with a remarkable journey of self-discovery. Like the main character in his much-beloved "The Alchemist, " Paulo is facing a grave crisis of faith. As he seeks a path of spiritual renewal and growth, he decides to begin again: to travel, to experiment, to reconnect with people and the landscapes around him.Some books are read. "Aleph "is lived.

Condition: Fine in very good plus dust jacket. Slight edge wear and residue from price sticker on back of dust jacket.Introduction by George Wickes. Aller Retour New York is truly vintage Miller, written during his most creative period, between Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn.

Vintage, Toronto, 2001. 2nd trade paperback printing. Condition: Good, edge wear and corner bumps, slight peeling of protective plastic on covers.With his first novel since the internationally acclaimed The English Patient, Booker Prize-winning author Michael Ondaatje gives us a work displaying all the richness of imagery and language and the piercing emotional truth that we have come to know as the hallmarks of his writing.

Random, New York, 1989. First hardcover edition. Condition: Near fine in near fine dust jacket. Slight edge nicks. 2nd printing.From the publisher: There is no other writer like him, says Gore Vidal of Anthony Burgess, and there is no other novel like Any Old Iron - his first major novel since the publication of Earthly Powers in 1980. Wildly original, in the celebrated Burgess tradition, Any Old Iron is a broad, multilayered historical portrait of our cataclysmic century from the sinking of the Titanic through the Russian Revolution and the two world wars to the creation of the state of Israel. Throughout these chaotic times, the destinies of two very different families, one Welsh, one Jewish, are bound together by an unusual marriage, an unrequited love, and a strange but solid friendship. Any Old Iron is a story of survival in the unfittest of worlds. But beneath this story lies another: the vivid revival of an ancient Celtic legend (the title is a clue) richly woven into the intricate fabric of… Read More

Penguin, Toronto, 1987. 21st paperback printing. Condition: Good, edge wear and creasing, corner creases, spine creasing, a well read book.From Mordecai Richler, one of our greatest satirists, comes one of literature's most delightful characters, Duddy Kravitz -- in a novel that belongs in the pantheon of seminal twentieth century books.Duddy -- the third generation of a Jewish immigrant family in Montreal -- is combative, amoral, scheming, a liar, and totally hilarious. From his street days tormenting teachers at the Jewish academy to his time hustling four jobs at once in a grand plan to "be somebody," Duddy learns about living -- and the lesson is an outrageous roller-coaster ride through the human comedy. As Richler turns his blistering commentary on love, money, and politics, The Apprenticeship Of Duddy Kravitz becomes a lesson for us all...in laughter and in life.

Condition: Very good plus, very light edge wear, price sticker residue.Features poetry by Richard Lemm, Elizabeth Philips, Jim Roberts, Sephanie Bolster, Neile Graham, Erina Harris, Anita Lahey, Linda Rogers, and P.K. Page.

Penguin, New York, 2001. First edition. Condition: Near fine, very light edge and corner wear.In this astonishingly acrobatic work, Paul Auster traces the compulsion to make literature -- or art -- through essays on Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett, Paul Celan, Laura Riding, Knut Hamsun, John Ashbery, and other vital figures of our century. In a section of interviews as well as in the revelatory "The Red Notebook", Auster reflects on his own work: on the need to break down the boundary between living and writing; on the use of certain genre conventions to penetrate matters of memory and identity. The Art of Hunger undermines and expands our accepted notions about literature and throws an unprecedented light on his own richly allusive writing.

New Directions, New York, 1968. First presumed edition NDP254. Condition: Good, edge and corner wear, corner crease, spine nicks and creasing, slight tears at spine, a well read book.Rimbaud—a mythic name—his life as extraordinary as his work was influential in redirecting the course, first of French, and then of world poetry. He is, indeed, the very symbol of what we now call "modern" literature; nearly a hundred years before the arrival of the "mind-expanding" drugs, Rimbaud understood that the borders of the writer's consciousness must be extended and made the deliberate attempt to use hallucination as a creative method.Dr. Starkie, a lecturer in French literature at Oxford, has devoted many years of research to Rimbaud.

Peter Owen, London, 1970. First edition. Condition: Near fine in very good dust jacket. Book has very light bumping at corners. Dust jacket has light edge wear and nicks, spine has light creasing, light soiling on rear cover, price clipped.The extraordinary and much-requested first volume of Cendrars' autobiography, this account chronicles the author's exploits in the Foreign Legion—including the loss of his arm—before the narrative sets off across continents. From Africa to South America, Cendrars encounters everyone from Gallic gipsies to Piquita, the Mexican millionairess. And to all his encounters he brings the vitality, savage humor, and vivid observation that characterize his dazzling writing.

Scribner, New York. 13th trade paperback printing. Condition: Near fine, very light edge and corner wear.Written between 1920 and 1937, when F. Scott Fitzgerald was at the height of his creative powers, these ten lyric tales represent some of the author's finest fiction. In them, Fitzgerald creates vivid, timeless characters -- a dissatisfied southern belle seeking adventure in the north; the tragic hero of the title story who lost more than money in the stock market; giddy and dissipated young men and women of the interwar period. From the lazy town of Tarleton, Georgia, to the glittering cosmopolitan centers of New York and Paris, Fitzgerald brings the society of the "Lost Generation" to life in these masterfully crafted gems, showcasing the many gifts of one of our most popular writers.

Grove/Evergreen E-130, New York, 1958. First trade paperback edition. Condition: Good, edge and corner wear, creasing at corners, tape repair at interior corners, spine creases and light nicks, light soiling on white area of rear cover.The setting of Jean Genet's celebrated play is a brothel that caters to refined sensibilities and peculiar tastes. Here men from all walks of life don the garb of their fantasies and act them out: a man from the gas company wears the robe and mitre of a bishop; another customer becomes a flagellant judge, and still another a victorious general, while a bank clerk defiles the Virgin mary. These costumed diversions take place while outside a revolution rages on which has isolated the brothel from the rest of the rebel-controlled city. In a stunning series of macabre, climactic scenes, Genet presents his caustic view of man and society.

Harvest/Harcourt, 2003. First trade paperback printing. Condition: Very good edge wear and corner bumps, bottom edge has small tears, spine crease and nicks.It is April 1204, and Constantinople, the splendid capital of the Byzantine Empire, is being sacked and burned by the knights of the Fourth Crusade. Amid the carnage and confusion, one Baudolino saves a historian and high court official from certain death at the hands of the crusading warriors and proceeds to tell his own fantastical story.Born a simple peasant in northern Italy, Baudolino has two major gifts-a talent for learning languages and a skill in telling lies. When still a boy he meets a foreign commander in the woods, charming him with his quick wit and lively mind. The commander-who proves to be Emperor Frederick Barbarossa-adopts Baudolino and sends him to the university in Paris, where he makes a number of fearless, adventurous friends.Spurred on by myths and their own reveries, this merry band sets out in search of Prester John, a… Read More