Search Results: Titles starting with D from Ed Smith Books

Toronto: Hanover Square Press, 2020. Uncorrected Proof. Paperback. A near fine copy, perfect bound in the original printed wrappers. It all starts on the morning the letter D disappears from language. First, it vanishes from Dhikilo's parents' conversation at breakfast, then from the road signs outside and from from her school dinners. Soon the local dentist and the neighbor's dalmatian are missing, and even the Donkey Derby has been called off." Though she doesn't know why. Dhikilo is summoned to the home of her old history teacher Professor Dodderfield and his faithful Labrador, Nelly Robinson. And this is where the story begins." A stunning and engaging modern-day Dickensian fable and a celebration of friendship and bravery for freethinkers everywhere. 295 pages.

New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2016. First edition. Hardcover. A fine copy bound in blue cloth with silver lettering. Foreword by Jon Stewart. The complete, uncensored history of the award-winning show. For almost 17 years, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart brilliantly redefined the borders between television comedy, political satire, and opinionated news coverage. It launched the careers of some of today's most significant comedians, highlighted the hypocrisies of the powerful, and garnered 23 Emmy Awards. Now the show's behind-the-scenes gags, controversies, and camaraderie will be chronicled by the players themselves, from legendary host Jon Stewart to the star cast members and writers including; Samantha Bee, Stephen Colbert, John Oliver, Steve Carell, Lewis Black, Jessica Williams, John Hodgman, and Larry Wilmore, plus some of the show's most prominent guests and adversaries; John and Cindy McCain, Glenn Beck, Tucker Carlson, and many more. Illustrated from photographs (color). 459 pages… Read More

New York: Dutton/Seymour Lawrence, 1988. First edition. Hardcover. A very good plus copy in a very good price-clipped dust jacket. Harrison has produced a masterpiece in this magnificent full-scale novel portraying five generations of a pioneer American family.

Washington DC: Smithsonian Institute Press, 1999. First edition. Hardcover. A near fine copy in a near fine dust jacket. Jeanloup Sieff. Preface by Jeanloup Sieff. Focusing primarily on dancers who have performed with the Paris Opera Ballet, this portfolio of forty-six duotone images taken between 1953 and 1994 pays homage to the art as revealed in dancers' bodies. Rudolf Nureyev stands intently playing a piano in a prop-filled studio; Suzanne Farrell, en pointe, gazes into a skylight, her tall silhouette seeming to float toward it; groups of dancers relax in a classroom, casually stretching while waiting to perform; Sylvie Guillem perches on a stool, gazing cooly at the camera over a folded knee; Carolyn Carlson peers intently into a mirror, brushing powder onto her hollow cheeks. Maintaining that dancers posses a "corporal intelligence" that gives them a unique ability to fill empty space with the beauty of their movements, Jeanloup Sieff has captured both the fleeting gestures of individual… Read More

New York: Atheneum, 1987. First edition. Laid into this copy is a press release as well as two 5 x 8 yellow ruled sheets with editorial notes.The central volume in Ivan Doig's acclaimed Montana trilogy, Dancing at the Rascal Fair is an authentic saga of the American experience at the turn of this century and a passionate, portrayal of the immigrants who dared to try new lives in the imposing Rocky Mountains. Doig's supple tale of landseekers unfolds into a fateful contest of the heart between Anna Ramsay and Angus McCaskill, walled apart by their obligations as they and their stormy kith and kin vie to tame the brutal, beautiful Two Medicine country. 400 pages.

Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1986. First edition. Hardcover. A near fine copy in a near fine dust jacket. This copy is briefly inscribed on the title page. Author's first book. Six stories encompassing a vast gamut of personalities, situations, and emotions, these stories penetrate our motives for doing what is right. Often there is no right or wrong, and the characters' motives for the choices they make are as diverse as the childhood memories they cherish and abhor. In the end, this book probes individual impulse and responsibility, creating stories so unerringly authentic that they become—irrepressibly—part of everyone who reads them. "The Darkness of Love" narrates three days in the life of a black policeman, distressed by his inner fears of racism and irresistibly attracted by his wife's sister. In "Dancing in the Movies" a college student returns to his hometown, where he finds his girlfriend—a heroin addict—and tries to convince her to overcome her habit. There are… Read More

London: Canongate Books Ltd, 2021. First edition. Hardcover. A fine unread copy in a fine dust jacket (stickers to front cover, as issued). Signed by Ian Rankin on a tipped-in sheet, this exclusive edition includes the transcript of Rankin and McIlvanney in conversation at the 2013 Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival. William McIlvanney's Laidlaw books changed the face of crime fiction. When he passed in 2015, he left half a handwritten manuscript of Laidlaw's first case. Now, Ian Rankin is back to finish what McIlvanney started and together, these two forces of crime fiction bring to life the criminal world of 1970s Glasgow, and Laidlaw's relentless quest for truth. 288 pages.

New York: Harper Collins, 2008. First editions. Hardcover. All three volumes nearly fine in nearly fine dust jackets. Three volumes; The Flight of the Night Hawks, Into a Dark Realm, and Wrath of a Mad God. The Darkwar rages upon Midkemia and Kelewan, bringing bleak days of destruction and despair. To save the future of both worlds, the powerful sorcerer Pug and select members of the secretive Conclave of Shadows must journey deep into the dangerous realm of the bloodthirsty Dasati, there to carry out an audacious mission that has little, if any, chance of succeeding.

Edinburgh: Canongate, 2017. First edition. Hardcover. A fine copy in a near fine dust jacket. Dr James Darke has expelled himself from the world. He writes compulsively in his 'coming of old age' journal; he eats little, drinks and smokes a lot. Meditating on what he has lost - the loves of his life, both dead and alive - he tries to console himself with the wisdom of the great thinkers and poets, yet finds nothing but disappointment. But cracks of light appear in his carefully managed darkness; he begins to emerge from his self-imposed exile, drawn by the tender, bruised filaments of love for his daughter and grandson. Rich in ideas and feeling, Rick Gekoski's debut novel is provocative and timely. With scalding prose, ruthless intelligence and an unforgettably vivid protagonist, it faces some of the greatest, most uncomfortable questions about how we choose to live, and how to die.

New York: Knopf, 2010. First Edition. Hardcover. A near fine copy in a near fine dust jacket. From one of our most admired writers: a collection of stories set mainly in the fertile imaginative landscape of the American West, written with the terse lyricism, cinematic detail, and wry humor that have become Sam Shepard's trademarks. A man traveling down Highway 90 West gets trapped alone overnight inside a Cracker Barrel restaurant, where he is tormented by an endless loop of Shania Twain songs on the overhead sound system. A wandering actor returns to his hometown against his better instincts and runs into an old friend, who recounts their teenage days of stealing cars, scoring Benzedrine, and sleeping with whores in Tijuana. A Minnesota family travels south for a winter vacation but, caught up in the ordinary tyrannies of family life, remains oblivious to the beauty of the Yucatán Peninsula. A solitary horse rancher muses on Sitting Bull and Beckett amid the jumble of stuff in his big country… Read More

Millerton: Aperture, 1973. First edition thus. Hardcover. Both are fine copies in fine dust jackets. Volume 1. Mexico 214 pages with index. Comprises about half of the original manuscript, mainly the years from 1923-1926 when Weston was in residence in Mexico. It illuminates Mexican society and culture in the 1920s, at the height of the Mexican Renaissance in the arts, as well as provides a self analysis of an artist and a revealing commentary on photography. Volume 2. California. Opens in January 1927. A new period in Weston's career has begun, when he developed, expanded and brought to maturity an attitude towards life and photography which he had discovered and nurtured in his three years in Mexico. He discovered new forms: The beauty of extreme close ups of shells and vegetables; bolder seeing of the human body; the breadth of landscapes; the incredible qualities of Point Lobos on the Pacific near his home in Carmel. 288 pages with index. Both books bound in green cloth with dust jackets.

Tucson: De Graza Gallery in the Sun, 1973. First edition. Hardcover. Bound in red leatherette spine with cream colored boards, a fine copy in a near fine, price-clipped jacket. de Grazia, Ted. 4to. Signed and dated in the year of publication by the author, marked 1/1. Nearly 450 years ago, the Spanish conquistador, Cabeza de Vaca, traveled into what now is the southwestern United States. He lived for a time among the Indians there and learned to understand and love them. Here, gathered together are de Grazia's paintings of the de Vaca trek. Among them are oils, watercolors, black and white sketches, china, enamels, and bronzes. These works, when arranged in order, tell the entire story of de Vaca and his companions. 69 pages.

New York: Knopf, 1927. First edition. Hardcover. A very good plus copy with some darkening to the spine label, top edge still has ochre color, the cloth is still bright with no major flaws. Ink ownership signature to front blank with a Seattle Bookstore label to the front pastedown with the price of $2.50. First issue, no jacket. The fictional portrayal of New Mexico's first Catholic archbishop, Jean-Baptiste Lamy (called Jean-Marie Latour in the book) is beautifully written in Cather's sparse but descriptive language. Its chapters—a series of tableaus in Latour's life—are based on Cather's own research and travels, and the many places she describes are real: Acoma Pueblo, Chimayó, Taos, and the Lamy quarry that provided the ochre sandstone for the St. Francis Cathedral in Santa Fe. Garrett Peck examines how Cather's visits to Santa Fe with her partner Edith Lewis in 1925 and 1926 inspired her to research and write the novel. Cather and Lewis, a professional editor who assisted Cather… Read More

New York: Farrar , Straus and Giroux, 2017. First edition. Hardcover. A fine copy in a fine dust jacket. Debriefing collects all of Susan Sontag's shorter fiction, a form she turned to intermittently throughout her writing life. The book ranges from allegory to parable to autobiography and shows her wrestling with problems not assimilable to the essay, her more customary mode. Here she catches fragments of life on the fly, dramatizes her private griefs and fears, lets characters take her where they will. The result is a collection of remarkable brilliance, versatility, and charm. Sontag's work has typically required time for people to catch up to it. These challenging works of literary art—made more urgent by the passage of years—await a new generation of readers. This is an invaluable record of the creative output of one of the most inquisitive and analytical thinkers of the twentieth century at the height of her power. 319 pages.

New York: Norton, 2019. First edition. hardcover. A very good plus book in a very good jacket with a few folds to the front panel. On her 120-acre homestead high in the Colorado Rockies, this beloved writer learns what it means to care for a piece of land and the creatures on it. In linked essays as lucid and invigorating as mountain air Houston delivers her most profound meditations yet on how to live simultaneously inside the wonder and the grief to love the damaged world and do what she can to help it thrive. 303 pages.

Columbia: R. L. Bryan, 1960. First edition. Hardcover. A very good copy in a very good dust jacket. Thick 8vo. This copy is inscribed by the poet on the front endpaper: "Inscribed for dear / Lucille Sessions, and in memory / of dear Blue, / with the love of their friend / (signed) Archibald Rutledge / Hampton / 19 March, 1961." Small name and address label to top left of front pastedown. Rutledge (1883-1973) was the first South Carolina poet laureate from 1934-1973. His poems often described his hunting and life experiences growing up on Hampton Plantation and the trips home to South Carolina in summer and for holidays. 635 pages.

Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2016. First edition. Hardcover. A near fine copy in a near fine dust jacket. Joel Sackett. Signed on the title page by the author. As friends began "going back to the land" at the same time that a health issue emerged, Kathleen Alcalá set out to reexamine her relationship with food at the most local level. Remembering her parents, Mexican immigrants who grew up during the Depression, and the memory of planting, growing, and harvesting fresh food with them as a child, she decided to explore the history of the Pacific Northwest island she calls home. In The Deepest Roots, Alcalá walks, wades, picks, pokes, digs, cooks, and cans, getting to know her neighbors on a much deeper level. Wanting to better understand how we once fed ourselves, and acknowledging that there may be a future in which we could need to do so again, she meets those who experienced the Japanese American internment during World War II, and learns the unique histories of the blended… Read More

New York: Bloomsbury, 1999. First American Edition, 1st Printing. Hardcover. A near fine copy in a near fine dust jacket. A sexy, riveting, psychological thriller about a young man with an unknowable past who lands in a small town, seduces a man's wife and steals his beloved dog. 280 pages.

Hayward: Bill Owens, 2022. First edition. Softcover. A fine copy in the original perfect bound photo illustrated wrappers. Francesca Cosanti. This copy is signed by Bill Owens on the half-title page. Designed by Kate Jordahl. A semi-autobiography/memoir written by the photographer (Suburbia) and craft beer pioneer (and master brewer) Bill Owens, the same who snapped those telling photographs at the Rolling Stones concert at Altamont Speedway outside Livermore, California on December 6, 1969. Owen's explains his graphic novel; "The Delco Years was written in 1999 and put away for 21 years. Then in the fall of 2020, for some uknown reason (COVID-19), I started rewriting and added illustrations." Up front Owens apologizes to any and all he has libeled in this novel (graphic). "I'm ADD-HD and pay AT&T an extra ten dollars a month for the "HD." Any connection to people living or dead is probably intended, but most likely purely by happenstance. This story is true except for the parts I made up." But… Read More

Seattle: Alephactory Press, 2018. First edition. Hardcover. A very good copy in a near fine dust jacket. Signed by both authors on the title page. Comically absurd and painfully real, DELIVER US is a prescient and provocative literary novel that moves swiftly through near-future Detroit as a black social-media activist leads a campaign against Amazon, whose new fleet of delivery drones offers rebirth to the blighted city while threatening to magnify existing racial inequalities. When retiree Luther Prince shoots down an Amazon delivery drone flying over his modest home in eastside Detroit, he gets slapped with criminal charges, and his granddaughter Piper takes to social media to campaign against the Seattlebased tech-giant, whose deal with the city and the FAA has given them two months to demonstrate the safety of their new drone delivery program. But are they saviors bringing jobs to the blighted city, or imperialists out for their own gain at the expense of Detroit's mostly black population?… Read More