Book Hauls!

[dask]

Great looking Harrison anthology, doesn't look familiar. Wonder if there was a paperback edition with a different cover?

Just found out there was another edition retitled BLAST OFF, hardback rather than paper, and contains a Jack Vance story I've never heard of: "The Howling Bounders." Anyone read it?

Picked this up today at a little packed to the gills used bookstore out in the San Juans:

 

[Connavar]

Proud owner of a second hand Swedish version of Gargantua. Rabelais satire,writing was the best thing i remember from literary class about medievil period literature. Cervantes, the non-english poets like Petrarca was nothing compared to reading the parts of Gargantua and Pantagruel.

 

[GOLLUM]

Proud owner of a second hand Swedish version of Gargantua. Rabelais satire,writing was the best thing i remember from literary class about medievil period literature. Cervantes, the non-english poets like Petrarca was nothing compared to reading the parts of Gargantua and Pantagruel.

Nice pick up. I have the English version. It's a mammoth book, so I've read sections of it only to date.

 

[Extollager]

A friend in the Seattle area gave me some books, which arrived yesterday. They include Herman Wouk's sole sf novel, The "Lomokome" Papers -- does anyone know this book? I'm not asking for information about the plot, but whether anyone has read it and liked it or not.

 

[Overread]

Blood of Tyrants by Naomi Novik! It's the last one too - the last Temeraire book!
Technically its also on pre-order but a week to go and I can't wait!

 

[GOLLUM]

A recent haul...

Childhood Memories and other stories - Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa *From the author of one of Italy's most enigmatic classics The Leopard comes this collection of Di Lampedusa's shorter fiction. Blurb: First complete and unexpurgated translation of Lampedusa's uncollected shorter prose. Contains the previously unpublished piece 'Torretta', Joy and the Law, The Siren as well as 'The Blind Kittens', the beginning of a sequel to The Leopard. Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, the author of one of the most poignant and enduringly popular novels of the twentieth century, left only a few other pieces of fiction when he died prematurely at the age of sixty. Childhood Memories and Other Stories, here presented in a new translation by Stephen Parkin and including the previously unpublished fragment 'The Turret', collects all of Lampedusa's extant shorter fiction and provides a revealing glimpse into the writer's workshop and the background to the composition of his masterpiece.

Satantango - Laszlo Krasznahorkai *I have Hungarian writer Krasznahorkai's best known work Melancholy of Resistance on order. It's something I've had my eye on for the last 2 years but as this book turned up recently I thought I would try this first. Apparently a first rate EPIC film was made based on this novel that runs for almost 7 hours! Blurb: In the darkening embers of a Communist utopia, life in a desolate Hungarian town has come to a virtual standstill. Flies buzz, spiders weave, water drips and animals root desultorily in the barnyard of a collective farm. But when the charismatic Irimias - long-thought dead - returns to the commune, the villagers fall under his spell. The Devil has arrived in their midst. Irimias will divide and rule: his arrival heralds the beginning of a period of violence and greed for the villagers as he sets about swindling them out of a fortune that might allow them to escape the emptiness and futility of their existence. He soon attains a messianic aura as he plays on the fears of the townsfolk and a series of increasingly brutal events unfold. Satantango follows the villagers as they are exploited and taken in by Irimias; as they drink and stumble their way toward the gradual realization of their mistake and ultimate demise. In its measured prose and long, Tolstoyan sentences, Satantango is nothing short of a literary masterpiece; a formal meditation on death and avarice, human fallibility and faith.

 

[dask]

If I recall correctly this is the guy who started The American Mercury with H.L. Mencken so I figured he'd be worth a try.

New printer, new operating system, by the way. Had Vista, now have Windows 8. Trying to figure things out. So far not too bad.

 

[hitmouse]

Bit of a minority interest this one:

A book on that particular and distinct Welsh dialect found in Pembrokeshire, especially North Pembrokeshire, home of my wife's family.

 

[dask]

City library's getting tricky with its periodic book sales. Usually Friday is half price day but no such luck this time around. Unless otherwise marked, all books, paperback and hardback, are $1 each. Which is nice in its own way as it eliminates the purchase of books possessing only secondary interest. But I did find two:

What can I say? Edited by Joshi, published by Penguin. Is there a better way to spend a buck?
The other is a 1939 hardback, THE LIFE OF REMBRANDT VAN RIJN by Hendrik Willem Van Loon. Looks really good.

 

[Victoria Silverwolf]

Looks like a good collection. Could you list the contents?

A while back I read the two-volume collection, edited by Peter Straub, entitled American Fantastic Tales.

Volume One:

Charles Brockden Brown
Somnambulism: A Fragment
Washington Irving
The Adventure of the German Student
Edgar Allan Poe
Berenice
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Young Goodman Brown
Herman Melville
The Tartarus of Maids
Fitz-James O’Brien
What Was It?
Bret Harte
The Legend of Monte del Diablo
Harriet Prescott Spofford
The Moonstone Mass
W. C. Morrow
His Unconquerable Enemy
Sarah Orne Jewett
In Dark New England Days
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
The Yellow Wall Paper
Stephen Crane
The Black Dog
Kate Chopin
Ma’ame Pélagie
John Kendrick Bangs
Thurlow’s Christmas Story
Robert W. Chambers
The Repairer of Reputations
Ralph Adams Cram
The Dead Valley
Madeline Yale Wynne
The Little Room
Gertrude Atherton
The Striding Place
Emma Francis Dawson
An Itinerant House
Mary Wilkins Freeman
Luella Miller
Frank Norris
Grettir at Thorhall-stead
Lafcadio Hearn
Yuki-Onna
F. Marion Crawford
For the Blood Is the Life
Ambrose Bierce
The Moonlit Road
Edward Lucas White
Lukundoo
Olivia Howard Dunbar
The Shell of Sense
Henry James
The Jolly Corner
Alice Brown
Golden Baby
Edith Wharton
Afterward
Willa Cather
Consequences
Ellen Glasgow
The Shadowy Third
Julian Hawthorne
Absolute Evil
Francis Stevens
Unseen—Unfeared
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Seabury Quinn
The Curse of Everard Maundy
Stephen Vincent Benét
The King of the Cats
David H. Keller
The Jelly-Fish
Conrad Aiken
Mr. Arcularis
Robert E. Howard
The Black Stone
Henry S. Whitehead
Passing of a God
August Derleth
The Panelled Room
H. P. Lovecraft
The Thing on the Doorstep
Clark Ashton Smith
Genius Loci
Robert Bloch
The Cloak

Volume Two:

John Collier
Evening Primrose
Fritz Leiber
Smoke Ghost
Tennessee Williams
The Mysteries of the Joy Rio
Jane Rice
The Refugee
Anthony Boucher
Mr. Lupescu
Truman Capote
Miriam
Jack Snow
Midnight
John Cheever
Torch Song
Shirley Jackson
The Daemon Lover
Paul Bowles
The Circular Valley
Jack Finney
I’m Scared
Vladimir Nabokov
The Vane Sisters
Ray Bradbury
The April Witch
Charles Beaumont
Black Country
Jerome Bixby
Trace
Davis Grubb
Where the Woodbine Twineth
Donald Wandrei
Nightmare
Harlan Ellison
I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream
Richard Matheson
Prey
T.E.D. Klein
The Events at Poroth Farm
Isaac Bashevis Singer
Hanka
Fred Chappell
Linnaeus Forgets
John Crowley
Novelty
Jonathan Carroll
Mr Fiddlehead
Joyce Carol Oates
Family
Thomas Ligotti
The Last Feast of Harlequin
Peter Straub
A Short Guide to the City
Jeff VanderMeer
The General Who Is Dead
Stephen King
That Feeling, You Can Only Say What It Is in French
George Saunders
Sea Oak
Caitlín Kiernan
The Long Hall on the Top Floor
Thomas Tessier
Nocturne
Michael Chabon
The God of Dark Laughter
Joe Hill
Pop Art
Poppy Z. Brite
Pansu
Steven Millhauser
Dangerous Laughter
M. Rickert
The Chambered Fruit
Brian Evenson
The Wavering Knife
Kelly Link
Stone Animals
Tim Powers
Pat Moore
Gene Wolfe
The Little Stranger
Benjamin Percy
Dial Tone

 

[dask]

AMERICAN SUPERNATURAL TALES:

The Adventure of the German Student by Washington Irving
Edward Randolph's Portrait by Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe
What Was It? by Fitz-James O'Brien
The Death Of Halpin Frayser by Ambrose Bierce
The Yellow Sign by Robert W. Chambers
The Real Right Thing by Henry James
The Call of Cthulhu by H.P. Lovecraft
The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis by Clark Ashton Smith
Old Garfield's Heart by Robert E. Howard
Black Bargain by Robert Bloch
The Lonesome Place by August Derleth
The Girl With The Hungry Eyes by Fritz Leiber
The Fog Horn by Ray Bradbury
A Visit by Shirley Jackson
Long Distance Call by Richard Matheson
The Vanishing American by Charles Beaumont
The Events of Poroth Farm by T.E.D. Klein
Night Shift by Stephen King
The Late Shift by Dennis Etchison
Vastarien by Thomas Ligotti
Endless Night by Karl Edward Wagner
The Hollow Man by Norman Partridge
Last Call for the Sons of Shock by David Schow
Demon by Joyce Carol Oates
In the Water Works (Birmingham, Alabama 1888) by Caitlin R. Kiernan

Sure would like to find the two volume Straub for a buck or two.

 

[Victoria Silverwolf]

Thanks!

Interesting to see the slight overlap in stories, and the much greater overlap in authors.

 

[Extollager]

Today's mail brought Faulkner's As I Lay Dying and the Library of America edition of Robert Frost. I recently read the Frost selections in an anthology and decided this was a poet I wanted to dig into.

 

[hitmouse]

Much as I find Asimov profoundly uninspiring, I am (slightly) regretting not purchasing Asimov's Lecherous Limericks, spotted in a car boot sale this morning for mere pennies. I did pick up a DVD of The Big Lebowski and one of the more obscure Super Furry Animals albums for a pound apeice, so time was not completely wasted.

 

[Fried Egg]

I've been pretty good at keeping a lid on new book acquisitions lately however I couldn't resist a pristine 1985 paperback edition of "The Nameless" by Ramsey Campbell for only 50p!

 

[JunkMonkey]

I've been pretty good at keeping a lid on new book acquisitions lately however I couldn't resist a pristine 1985 paperback edition of "The Nameless" by Ramsey Campbell for only 50p!

Nice one! I too have been trying to curb my random over-purchasing habits (damn you, eBay!) but I couldn't resist this which I found on a local church hall's 'take a book and leave a quid' shelves:

​

640 odd pages of Frankensteiny goodness for a quid? It would have been rude to have left it.

Full contents:
Peter Haining – The Frankenstein Collection « Vault Of Evil

 

[antiloquax]

Bought two books today:
Girl Genius Phil and Kaja Foglio
Among Others Jo Walton

 

[JunkMonkey]

Only one book yesterday: The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman. Signed before my very eyes in the fair city of Inverness by the man himself. Then an agonising moment of indecision; the 'rules' for the signing were that he would sign one copy of Ocean, and one anything else. (If you had two copies of Ocean... etc..) So... which one...? Swither... swither... my ancient edition of the annotated script of his Babylon 5 script Day of the Dead? The wife's copy of Stardust? Or should it be Number Two Daughter's copy of Coraline? - (Number One Daughter was with me and had asked a very wise and perspicacious question at the Q & A.) Swither.... swither...

My youngest daughter now has a signed copy of Coraline.

I'm such a good dad.

 

[JunkMonkey]

Mind you, my wife's not talking to me...

 

[dask]

Couple of library freebies: