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BOOKS FOR SALE

If you want me to send the books to you or someone else, add price of postage.  Otherwise, books can be delivered/picked up in the greater Los Angeles area.

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List in progress as I sort and pack my shelves, with annotations for your amusement/informed purchase:

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1. J.D. Salinger, Nine Stories [FREE, beat-up paperback]

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2. H.D. Thoreau, Cape Cod [$1, paperback in good shape; bought this book when I lived on Cape Cod and wanted to get to know my surroundings—never finished it]

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3. Hannah Arendt, Totalitarianism: Part Three of The Origins of Totalitarianism [$1, paperback with a few margins ticks by me; purchased the complete Origins, so don’t need this slim volume anymore]

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4. Shani Mootoo, Out on Main Street [$3, paperback first edition in very good condition; I tried to get into these stories, but they seemed so amateurish to me, even at 19—people say that Cereus Blooms should redeem her and maybe these stories are worth revisiting, but not by me]

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5. Marcus Aurelius, Meditations [$1, paperback in good condition, no markings]

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6. M.M. Bakhtin, Toward a Philosophy of the Act [$1, paperback with occasional marginalia and underlining; an early effort to think through ethics and authorship—I liked it but doubt that I’ll return to it] TAKEN!

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7. Martin Buber, Good and Evil [$1, paperback in very good; couldn’t get into it]

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8. Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar [$1, paperback in very good; the winters in Astana will be dark, cold, and long enough already, I don’t need to think about this book waiting for me in America]

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9. Grace Paley, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute [$2, paperback in very good; this is a great collection—I’m only parting with it since I have the Complete Stories volume]

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10. Wilhelm Dilthey, Pattern and Meaning in History [$1, paperback in very good; a search for “the solution to the epistemological problem of history”—I don’t need to probe these depths again in this life #undergradilemmas]

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11. V. Nabokov, Transparent Things [FREE, musty paperback; what once was interesting is now irritating]

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12. V. Nabokov, Lolita [FREE, another musty paperback; what once was amusing is now annoying]

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13. Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason [$2, paperback with occasional marginalia in the first 100 pages; read this for a seminar on History, Memory, and Theory—have wondered since how a writer can blow so much hot air while sucking the life out of his prose—composition in German might be the key—but there are passing interesting moments]

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14. Marquis de Sade, Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom and Other Writings [$1, paperback from Grove Press; this is the edition that all the American students were reading in the 1960s—relive the adventure for just a buck!]

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15. Nikolai Gogol, Diary of a Madman and Other Stories [FREE, old Signet Classics paperback]

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16. Vassily Aksyonov, In Search of Melancholy Baby [$2, hardcover; a well-known Soviet author comes to 1970s America and records his impressions]

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17. Vladimir Kunin, Intergirl [$1, paperback in very good; a classic Perestroika tale of prostitution and redemption, sorta—later made into a watchable film]

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18. Liisa Malkki, Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory, and National Cosmology among Hutu Refugees in Tanzania [$2, paperback with v. occasional marginalia; got this one for a seminar on the anthropology of international order—a good read but I probably won’t come back to it]

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19. Ayun Halliday, No Touch Monkey! [$1, paperback in very good; if you ever read the zine East Village Inky, this book is by the same author and has much the same feel, but with more editorial polish—funny stories of naivete and child-rearing]

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20. Thomas Kohnstamm, Do Travel Writers Go to Hell? [$1, paperback in very good; the behind-the-scenes tell-all of a Lonely Planet writer]

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21. Fernando Alegria, Allende: A Novel [$1, paperback in very good; bought, meant to read it, never got to it]

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22. Umberto Eco, Baudolino [$3, hardcover in very good;bought it but could never find time to read it and can’t see the time coming soon]

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23. Alma Guillermoprieto, Looking for History: Dispatches from Latin America [$2, hardcover in very good; reportage from Cuba, Colombia, and Mexico in the 1990s]

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24. Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge [$1, Vintage paperback in v. good]

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25. Rainer Maria Rilke, The Selected Poetry of RMR [$1, Vintage paperback in v. good; buy with #24 and you have the angsty adolescent starter pack!]

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26. Orhan Pamuk, The Black Book [$2, Harvest Paperback in v. good; read half the book in one sitting while home with a fever—can’t remember a lick of it and feel silly starting from the beginning again]

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27. Jurek Becker, Jacob the Liar [$1, paperback in good condition; read this instead of seeing the horrible movie with Robin Williams]

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28. Tom Stoppard, The Coast of Utopia (in three vols.) [$2, paperbacks in very good; bought before catching the play in Moscow—review here.]

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29. Kenneth Rexroth and Ling Chung, Women Poets of China [$2, paperback in very good; reprint of a classic New Directions edition from 1972]

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30. James McBride, The Color of Water [$1, paperback in good; a mother’s love conquers racism, and if you believe that, I’ve got a book to sell you.  This one.]

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31. Han Ong, Fixer Chao [$2, hardcover in very good; bought this one when I thought I would try to “catch up” on Asian American literature, but the prose left me cold—way too 90s slam poetry meets Iowa Writers Workshop]

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32. David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest [$1, paperback in good; seriously, I’m never going to have the time or inclination to read this one cover-to-cover]

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33. Yuri Dombrovsky, The Faculty of Useless Knowledge [$2, hardcover in very good; a helluva novel, but this translation is horrid—happily, I have the Russian edition]

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34. Great Short Works of Fyodor Dostoevsky (including The Double, Notes from Underground, The Gambler and others) [$1 Harper Perennial in good; a nice collection, but, again, I’m collecting the original Russian texts]

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35. Charles Baxter, The Believers [FREE, paperback in good, underlining in last story (not by me!); a friend in an MFA program recommended this author—I enjoyed the first story, but not enough to felt driven to finish the book]

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36. A.M. Homes, Things You Should Know [$2, hardcover in very good; I loved The End of Alice and In a Country of Mothers—these stories are solid, but not the strongest showing from Homes]

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37. Ernest Hemingway, In Our Time [$1, paperback in very good; a nice collection of stories, but I’m not coming back to it]

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38. James T. Farrell, The Silence of History [$1, paperback in very good; from the author of the Studs Lonigan trilogy comes this late-in-life shot at a working-class Bildungsroman]

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39. Rita Mae Brown, Rubyfruit Jungle [FREE, Bantam paperback in good, but musty shape; a classic]

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40. Michael Cunningham, Flesh and Blood [$3, first edition hardcover in very good; nice simple but descriptive prose, but MC was not at his prime in terms of plotting and story in this one]

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41. Thomas Friedman, The Lexus and the Olive Tree [$1, paperback in very good; globalization will give you the money to vacation in Bali, but it might also ruin some of the sights—such insights pass for a critical appraisal of capitalism]

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42. Benjamin Barber, Jihad vs. McWorld [$1, paperback in very good; an early stab at figuring out post-Cold War world order]

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43. Osamu Tezuka, Buddha vol. 1 [$2, paperback in very good; a bio-graphic novel on the early life of Siddhartha Gautama by the most famous of Japan’s post-war comix artists]

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44. Charles Jackson, The Lost Weekend [$1, paperback in very good; a memorable account of an alcoholic binge]

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45. Andre Dubus, Selected Stories [$1, paperback in very good; good stories, but I probably won’t come back to them]

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46. Wallace Stevens, Collected Poems [$2, paperback in like new]

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47. Frank Elgar and Robert Maillard, Picasso [$3, hardcover in very good; a classic study of the artist with many illustrations]

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48. William Glasser, The Quality School [FREE, paperback; how to run your school without coercion by applying management principles]

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49. Paulo Freire and Ira Shor, A Pedagogy for Liberation [$1, paperback in very good; a nice dialogue on transformative education]

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50. Jonathan Kozol, Savage Inequalities [$1, paperback in very good; a memorable indictment of American education—I read it over a decade ago and the opening chapter on East St. Louis still sticks in my head]

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51. Jonathan Kozol, On Being a Teacher [$2, hardcover in very good, signed by author; a manifesto to change “an archaic and dehumanizing institution”—the public school]

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52. Lucien Malson, Wolf Children and the Problem of Human Nature (with text of Itard’s The Wild Boy) [FREE, paperback with some underlining in Itard’s text; a wild read]

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53. Howard Gardner, Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences [$1 paperback with a few passages underlined or marginalia-ticked; on how your brains works, or doesn’t]

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54. Gore Vidal, 1876 [FREE, Ballantine mass paperback]

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55. Louise Penny, Still Life [FREE, mass paperback; murder mystery set in Quebec]

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56. Nathaniel West, The Day of the Locust [FREE, mass paperback; “a sun-drenched California nightmare” says the back cover]

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57. Vine Deloria, Jr., Custer Died for Your Sins [FREE, mass paperback; every scholar should read the chapter “Anthropologists and Other Friends”—only giving it away as we went in for a nice hardcover edition]

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58. Jonathan Lethem, Motherless Brooklyn [$1, paperback in very good; this one was Eliza’s so I can’t comment, but it won some awards, for whatever that’s worth]

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59. Manuel Ramos, Moony’s Road to Hell [$1, hardcover, like new; also Eliza’s—it’s some mystery novel]

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60. Brian Hart, Then Came the Evening [$2, hardcover, like new; harsh and tender tale set in Idaho]

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61. Rajaa Alsanea, Girls of Riyadh [$2, hardcover, like new; young Saudi women portrayed in a novel]

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62. Bernard Wolfe, Come on Out, Daddy [$1, hardcover, good; portrait of early 1960s Hollywood by Trotsky’s former secretary]

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63. Peter Landesman, The Raven [$1, paperback in very good; a novel of seaside Maine]

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64. Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, Left Behind [FREE, paperback with slight water damage; the millenarian insanity begins]

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65. Peter Beaumont, Drylands: Environmental Management and Development [$2, paperback; $2 for a Routledge book—tell me where else you can find that!]

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66. Frank Chin, Gunga Din Highway [FREE, uncorrected galley proof]

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67. Michael Chabon (ed.), McSweeney’s Thrilling Tales [$1, paperback in good; collection of hip tales from 2002]

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68. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Wonders of the African World [$2, hardcover, like new; I have no memory of where, when, or why I bought this coffee table decoration—maybe for the opening essay on Africa by Gates?]

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69. Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger [$1, paperback in very good]

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70. Aravind Adiga, Last Man in Tower [$2, hardcover, like new]

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71. Ivan Doig, Dancing at the Rascal Fair [$1, paperback in very good; a novel of Montana life]

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72. William Faulkner, The Hamlet [FREE, beat-up mass paperback; it’s Faulkner, you probably know how you feel about it already]

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73. Carlos Bulosan, America is in the Heart [$1, paperback in good condition, v. occasional underlining and marginalia by a previous reader who was clearly interpreting this novel just after reading Eve Sedgwick on male homosocial relations; a great book, but I don’t need two copies]

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74. Mary Doria Russell, The Sparrow [$1, paperback in very good; Jesuit sci-fi novel—curious?]

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75. Charles Bukowski, Run with the Hunted (Anthology) [$1, paperback in very good; what I said about Faulkner, mutatis mutandis]

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76. Thomas Mallon, Fellow Travelers [$2, hardcover in very good; homosexual desire in the shadow of the Cold War—neither the sex nor the political intrigue is hot enough in this brisk novel, but it might be good for a beach read]

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77. The Paris Review, issues 194-199 [$3 for all, or $1/each; poetry, short stories, and interviews—TOC for each issue here: http://www.theparisreview.org/back-issues]

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78. Paul Goodman, The Paul Goodman Reader [$1, paperback in v. good; a basic introduction to the writer’s works from PM Press]

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79. James Michener, Caribbean [$1, hardcover in v. good; ordered a book of essays on the history of sexuality by John D’Emilio and was sent this tome instead—random observations like “history and geography don’t mix well in the Caribbean” abound in my skimming of the novel]

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MORE TITLES ADDED SOON…