Search Results: Short Story Collections from Lightholder Books

Cast a Cold Eye by Mary McCarthy. 1950 Harcourt Brace, first edition, 212 pages. Collection of seven short stories, some having appeared in the New Yorker and Mademoiselle, including "The Old Men" and "The Blackguard."

Condition: Good/VG. Jacket has many chips and and tear on front cover, see photos. Boards shelf worn, pages clean.

"She would leave him, she thought, as soon as the petunias bloomed."

Clara: Thirteen Short Stories and a Novel by Luisa Valenzuela. 1976 Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, first U.S. edition, 233 pages. An award-winning author from Argentina, Valenzuela's work challenged power structures from a feminist perspective.
Condition: VG. Some shelf wear to boards.
"As you can imagine, I'm seeking total absolution of my sins."

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."

The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford. 1969 FSG, first edition/printing. Some wear and chips to jacket, owner name on end paper, pages in very good condition. This volume includes thirty stories that spanned her career, including those that appeared in the New Yorker.

"When I woke up that morning, in the fallow light before the sunrise, and remembered that the night before I had got engaged to Rod Stephansson, I could feel my blue eyes growing bluer..."

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."

The Little Disturbances of Man by Grace Paley. 1959 Doubleday, first edition, 189 pages. This was Paley's debut collection, the first of a remarkable career has a master short-story writer.

Condition: Acceptable/Good. Jacket quite browned, chipped, pages browned, shelf wear to boards.

"My husband gave me a broom one Christmas. This wasn't right."

New Directions in Prose & Poetry. Edited by James Laughlin IV, 1966 New Directions. This was the first publication by the legendary publisher, and includes work by Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Henry Miller, Kay Boyle, Elizabeth Bishop, and more. According to Triolet Rare Books: "Gallup states that 513 copies total were printed, of which 204 were in boards."
Condition: Book in good+ condition, boards are bumped, tanning to edges, browning to end papers, spine square and pages clean.

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."

Three Lives by Gertrude Stein. 1909 Grafton Press, first edition, 279 pages. A thousand copies were printed of the first edition, 300 of which were used for the British edition. Stein's debut tells three unlinked stories of working class women in a fictional Baltimore. These stories are more accessible than Stein's later work, yet still new in style. No publisher would publish it so she funded her own publication with the vanity press Grafton Press. Later Stein would sell some Picassos to establish her own publisher to publisher her books.

Condition: Very good. Without dust jacket, as issued (Gertrude Stein: A Bibliography; Wilson, Phoenix Bookshop). Rubbing and shelf wear to boards, bumps to spine, the slightest of leans, small pencil markings on endpapers.

"The tradesmen of Bridgeport learned to dread the sound of "Miss Mathilda," for with that name the good Anna always conquered."

Tranquility Base and Other Stories by Asa Baber. 1979 Fiction International, unstated printing, 140 pages. Baber was a columnist for Playboy magazine, often arguing for men's rights and virtues while writing on divorce and depression. His style was sometimes referred to as "macho journalism." Most of the stories in this collection preceded his column.
Condition: VG with shelf wear to the cover.
"It was not until his wife tried to kill him that Cody had some inkling his marriage was in trouble."

When Things of the Spirit Come First by Simone De Beauvoir. 1982 Pantheon, first U.S. edition, 213 pages. Includes five early semi-autobiographical short stories of the life of an intellectual French woman.

Condition: VG. Some smudging to back cover, bumps on spine.

"She liked crying in churches best..."