Search Results: Fiction from Lightholder Books

An Academic Question by Barbara Pym. 1986 Dutton, first American edition, 182 pages. Pym was an English novelist, forever forgotten and rediscovered. In a retrospective in the New York Times: "However remote her themes may seem — a churn of parish politics and petty romances — beneath the gentle surfaces of her novels is a slow-building comedy, salt wit in a saline drip. " Pym wrote thirteen novels, Academic was published posthumously.
Condition: Jacket in good condition with some wear, price clipped, book in good condition with owner name on end paper
"What jewels will you be wearing tonight, Mother?"

Angels by Denis Johnson. 1983 Knopf, first edition, 209 pages. Johnson was a novelist and poet who garnered acclaim for his short-story collection Jesus's Son and award-winning novel Tree of Smoke. According to New York Times, "[His] novels and short stories about the fallen — junkies, down-and-out travelers, drifters and violent men in the United States and abroad — emerged in ecstatic, hallucinatory and sometimes minimalist prose." Angels was Johnson's first novel. Alice Hoffman wrote in her review for the New York Times: "'Angels' is a terrifying book, a mixture of poetry and obscenity. Some readers may be put off by its melodrama and nearly overwhelming sense of desperation. But whether the characters are conversing with a dark angel or ordering a platter of french fries, they are people who can't be ignored. Mr. Johnson has written a dazzling and savage first novel."
Condition: VG, some shelf wear to the jacket
"In the Oakland Greyhound all the people were dwarfs, and they pushed and shoved… Read More

An Excursion to the Sky by Grozdana Olujic. 1961 Dutton, first U.S. edition, 156 pages. Olujic was a Serbian author of novels, essays, fairy tales, and children's books. Excursion was her debut novel, published when she was twenty-four years old and inspired comparisons to Francoise Sagan (but make it bleak) and criticism from the "socialist realism" school of thought.
Condition: Jacket VG, some wear, book VG, glue residue on front pastedown
"At that moment I wasn't exactly dying to think of myself. Thinking about oneself, of one thinks honestly, is no special pleasure. I've generally left that satisfaction to other people."

Cliffs of Fall and other stories by Shirley Hazzard. 1963 first U.S. edition, 192 pages. Hazzard was an Australian-American author and essayist best known for her novels Transit of Venus and the Great Fire. Cliffs was her debut, a short-story collection in which all but one of the stories was published in the New Yorker (she was one of the few writers to be discovered in the slush pile). In a review in the New Yorker for her collected stories, Alice Gregory writes of her story "The Picnic," "...Hazzard came upon a theme that preoccupied her for a lifetime: the way love can be at once perishable and, in its reshaping of our minds, permanent."
Condition: Jacket in good condition, with tear top portion of jacket torn away, and chips, book in good condition, owner sticker on end paper, wear to boards
"The Fergusons' door opened on a burst of light and voices, and on Evie's squeal of surprise---quite as if, Minna thought, we had turned up uninvited."

Complete Stories by Clarice Lispector. Translated by Katrina Dodson. 2015 New Directions, second printing, 645 pages. Cult favorite Ukrainian-born Lispector was a celebrated Brazilian writer who wrote in a stream-of-consciousness style. She notoriously was in a near-fatal apartment fire, which she never mentally recovered from. As recounted in a retrospective in the New York Times "'When I don't write,' Lispector told an interviewer in her sole television appearance shortly after finishing the book, 'I am dead.' When the interviewer proposed that the author could be reborn in a new book, Lispector demurred, saying: 'For the moment I'm dead. I'm speaking from my tomb."' Here are all her stories.
Condition: VG
"Luisa remains motionless, sprawled atop the tangled sheets, her hair spread out on the pillow. An arm here, another there, crucified by lassitude."

Confessions of Love by Uno Chiyo. 1990 Peter Owen, first UK edition (c/r 1935),157 pages. Chiyo was a Japanese author, magazine founder, and kimono designer who shocked Japanese society with her public love affairs and short bobbed haircut. Later in life she was recognized as a legend and her novels recognized as masterpieces. Confessions was her debut novel and depicts her first major love affair and Japan in the roaring twenties. This edition was the first translated into English.
Condition: VG
"I became so furious I wanted to spit."

Devil at Westease by V. Sackville-West. 1947 Doubleday, first edition, 219 pages. Rebecca Dinerstein Knight in The Paris Review starts a wonderful biographical essay on Sackville-West thusly: "How preposterous is it that Vita Sackville-West, the best-selling bisexual baroness who wrote over thirty-five books that made an ingenious mockery of twenties societal norms, should be remembered today merely as a smoocher of Virginia Woolf? The reductive canonization of her affair with Woolf has elbowed out a more luxurious, strange story: Vita loved several women with exceptional ardor; simultaneously adored her also-bisexual husband, Harold; ultimately came to prefer the company of flora over fauna of any gender; and committed herself to a life of prolific creation (written and planted) that redefined passion itself." Devil at Westease is perhaps Sackville-West's rarest novel and wasn't published in Britain at the time. According to a New York Times review "This new book by V. Sackville-West, poet, novelist,… Read More

The Heir by V. Sackville-West. 1922 George H. Doran, first U.S. edition, 250 pages. Rebecca Dinerstein Knight in The Paris Review starts a wonderful biographical essay on Sackville-West thusly: "How preposterous is it that Vita Sackville-West, the best-selling bisexual baroness who wrote over thirty-five books that made an ingenious mockery of twenties societal norms, should be remembered today merely as a smoocher of Virginia Woolf? The reductive canonization of her affair with Woolf has elbowed out a more luxurious, strange story..." The Heir is a novella of inheritance and property.
Condition: Good. No DJ, owner name on first page, slight lean to spine, some bumps to the boards
"Mr. Nutley glanced at him with a faint contempt."

I Will Maintain by Marjorie Bowen. 1943 first Penguin edition (c/r 1910). Penguin books published during WWII were subject to paper rations. The paper quality of the pages are thinner than a normal Penguin book and the print runs were smaller. Features ads for Kolynos dental cream, Peek Frean's biscuits, and Cravena cigarettes. Marjorie Bowen was one of the pseudonyms of Margaret Gabrielle Vere Long and she wrote in a variety of genres. I Will Maintain is the first of a trilogy of historical fiction based on William III, who fought France three times.

Condition: 1/2 inch worn from both head and tail of cover spine, bent cover corners, foxing to matte cover, owner name on title page, exposed staples, pages tanned but clean. Please see photos for extent of condition, acceptable.

"Not that his trust in himself was diminished; but he had already begun to doubt if he had taken his services to the best market or pledged himself to the most profitable of masters."

The Journal of Albion Moonlight by Kenneth Patchen. 1941 self-published first edition, second issue, #118 of 295 copies made, 314 total pages. No DJ, boards in good condition, spine quite sunned but square, some shelf wear to board edges, bookplate on paste down end paper, erased pencil mark on back end paper, book in overall good+ condition. See photos! New Directions first rejected this novel (on account of its pacifism), which is why Patchen self-published it at first. Experimental in form and appearance.
"We never admire a man: we admire our admiration for him."

The Last Sumurai by Helen DeWitt. 2000 Hyperion/Miramax Books, first edition, 530 pages. This book is a beast! Cerebral, tricky, engrossing, DeWitt complicates the quest storyline with linguistics and point of view. A boy genius disrupts his mother's ambitions with his questions about language and paternity. The book went out of print after the publisher folded and permissions, rights, and formatting prevented reissues. It has since come back in print, but here is the original epic, now recognized as a masterpiece.
Condition: VG. Bumps to corners of the boards, creasing at the corners, darkening at the text block corners.
"I was still drunk, and I was still trying to think of things I could do without being unpardonably rude. Well, I thought, I could sleep with him without being rude, and so I responded in a a suitable manner as he unbuttoned the buttons of my dress."

The Nine Guardians by Rosario Castellanos. Translated by Irene Nicholson. 1992 Readers International reprint (c/r 1957), 272 pages. Castellanos was a feminist poet, essayist, and novelist who wrote confessional fiction and criticized male literary figures of the time. According to an essay in the Paris Review: "As a child, Castellanos was cared for by a Mayan woman, Rufina, in whose Tzotzil prayers and legends the future author discovered the joy of language. Their relationship is fictionalized in Castellanos's 1957 autobiographical debut novel, Balún-Canán (translated by Irene Nicholson as The Nine Guardians). The novel was written, Castellanos said, simply by "letting myself be carried along by the flow of my memories." It is partly narrated by a naive seven-year-old girl, who bears witness to an indigenous Mexican rebellion against the brutal feudalism practiced by her father."
Condition: VG
"Now I know that this is the voice I've been hearing ever since I was born."

Nocturnes by Thomas Mann. With Lithographs by Lynd Ward. 1934 Equinox Cooperative Press, #298 of 1000 copies, signed by Mann, 61 pages. Mann was a German Nobel-winning author well known for Death in Venice and Magic Mountain. He was an exiled writer for his opposition to Hitler. Nocturnes consists of three short stories A Gleam, Railway Accident, and A Weary Hour.
Condition: Book in VG condition, some fading to boards, slipcase in fair condition and has split apart.
"Waltz time, tinkling glasses; smoke, steam, hubbub, voices, dance steps. We all know these little weaknesses of ours."

Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout. 2008 Random House, first edition, 270 pages. Strout's third novel of interwoven stories that take place in rustic Maine won the Pulitzer Prize and was adapted into one of my personal favorite mini-series.
Condition: VG, remainder mark, bump to board
"Autumn now, November, and so many years later that when Henry runs a comb through his hair on this Sunday morning, he has to pluck some strands of gray from the black plastic teeth before slipping the comb back into his pocket."

Palimpsest by H.D. 1968 Southern Illinois Press, first printing. Hilda Doolittle was a poet and friend of Ezra Pounds, who became her editor. According to the New Yorker: "H.D.'s tense, chiselled verse led critics to describe her, repeatedly, as "the perfect Imagist." Her lyrics extracted sensory abundance from minimalism...She developed a reputation as "crystalline," not just for her poetry but for her physical presence: chaste, ethereal, as lovely and cold as a classical sculpture. Always, she found people who considered her perfect. She attracted devotees, usually younger men who breathlessly affirmed that in her presence they had discovered a Greek goddess incarnate[.]" According to the jacket copy, Palimpsest first appeared in Paris in 1926 and Houghton Mifflin acquired unbound sheets. This edition is based on those sheets plus corrections H.D. made on her copies.
Condition: VG, inscription on end paper.
"He seemed inconsequently to himself, to be penned in some pig-style of illusion."

Precious Bane by Mary Webb. 1938 first Modern Library edition (c/r 1926), 356 pages. Webb was a romance novelist and poet, and although the likes of Rebecca West and J.M. Barrie were fans, she wasn't recognized for her genius until after her death when reissues of her books became bestsellers. Precious Bane is set in Shopshire, , and the "precious bane" is the detriment of the pursuit of wealth.
Condition: Jacket in acceptable fragile condition with many chips, book is in good+ condition with some wear and tanning to blue flexi boards, owner name on endpaper.
"We are so small and helpless on the earth that is like a green rush cradle where mankind lies, looking up at the stars, but not knowing what they be."

Pride and Prejudice and Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen. Undated (I believe 1940s), Thomas Nelson, 345/216 pages. Includes illustration on first page, bound in leather and gilt pages. Two novels, including a favorite, by one of the greats.
Condition: Good. Some wearing away of the leather, discoloring on end papers.
"No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy would have supposed her born to be a heroine."

Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen. 1864 Tauchnitz (this edition printed after 1877 as Emma is on ad card), 340 pages. Marbled boards and endpapers, gilt pages, leather bound. A classic in beautiful presentation.
Condition: Good+, pages have warping and browning
"He was not handsome, and his manners required intimacy to make them pleasing."

She Came to Stay by Simone de Beauvoir. 1954 World Publishing Company, first U.S. edition, 404 pages. This fictional account of de Beauvoir's relationship with Jean-Paul Sartre and Olga Kosakiewicz (to whom the book is dedicated) on the eve of war. A threesome gone wrong.
Condition: Good/VG. Jacket worn and browned, chips along edges, water stain on bottom of jacket, boards bright, some bumps on spine, spine square, pages crisp and clean.
"Gerbert's eyes worried her, his face was haggard and tense; he almost looked his twenty years."

The Crazy Ladies by Joyce Elbert. 1969 New American Library, first edition, 438 pages. Elbert, who died in 2009, had a slight resurgence recently with the release of a book of eight essays. In an article for the Star Tribune, Kathleen Rooney starts her review of A Tale of Five Cities : "A contemporary of Jacqueline Susann, credited by Cosmopolitan magazine with writing "the first really great dirty book," Joyce Elbert made a splash in 1969 with her novel "The Crazy Ladies," a slinky, metropolitan, woman-centric romp that sold more than 4 million copies worldwide."
Condition: Jacket VG with some wear, book VG with some bumps
"There was nothing she would not do in bed if it struck her as amusing at the moment."