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Giovanni's Room

Part of Vintage International

Author James Baldwin
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Paperback
$15.00 US
Knopf | Vintage
5.17"W x 7.98"H x 0.53"D  
On sale Sep 12, 2013 | 176 Pages | 978-0-345-80656-7
Add to cart Add to list Exam Copies
  • English Language Arts > Genre: Fiction > People & Places by Group > African American
  • English Language Arts > Genre: Fiction > People & Places by Group > LGBTQIA+
  • English Language Arts > Literature: American > 20th Century
  • About
  • Author
  • Excerpt
  • Praise
Set in the 1950s Paris of American expatriates, liaisons, and violence, a young man finds himself caught between desire and conventional morality. With a sharp, probing imagination, James Baldwin's now-classic narrative delves into the mystery of loving and creates a moving, highly controversial story of death and passion that reveals the unspoken complexities of the human heart.

“If Van Gogh was our 19th-century artist-saint, James Baldwin is our 20th-century one.” —Michael Ondaatje

“A young American involved with both a woman and a man. . . . Baldwin writes of these matters with unusual candor and yet with such dignity and intensity.” —The New York Times

“Absorbing . . . [with] immediate emotional impact.” —The Washington Post

“Mr. Baldwin has taken a very special theme and treated it with great artistry and restraint.” —Saturday Review

“Exciting . . . a book that belongs in the top rank of fiction.” —The Atlantic

“Violent, excruciating beauty.” —San Francisco Chronicle

“To be James Baldwin is to touch on so many hidden places in Europe, America, the Negro, the white man —to be forced to understand so much.” —Alfred Kazin

“This author retains a place in an extremely select group; that composed of the few genuinely indispensable American writers.” —Saturday Review

“He has not himself lost access to the sources of his being —which is what makes him read and awaited by perhaps a wider range of people than any other major American writer.” —The Nation

“He is thought-provoking, tantalizing, irritating, abusing and amusing. And he uses words as the sea uses waves, to flow and beat, advance and retreat, rise and take a bow in disappearing . . . the thought becomes poetry and the poetry illuminates thought.” —Langston Hughes

“He has become one of the few writers of our time.” —Norman Mailer
© The Granger Collection
James Baldwin (1924–1987) was a novelist, essayist, playwright, poet, and social critic. His first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, appeared in 1953 to excellent reviews, and his essay collections Notes of a Native Son and The Fire Next Time were bestsellers that made him an influential figure in the growing civil rights movement. Baldwin spent much of his life in France, where he moved to escape the racism and homophobia of the United States. He died in France in 1987, a year after being made a Commander of the French Legion of Honor. View titles by James Baldwin
I stand at the window of this great house in the south of France as night falls, the night which is leading me to the most terrible morning of my life. I have a drink in my hand, there is a bottle at my elbow. I watch my reflection in the darkening gleam of the window pane. My reflection is tall, perhaps rather like an arrow, my blond hair gleams. My face is like a face you have seen many times. My ancestors conquered a continent, pushing across death-laden plains, until they came to an ocean which faced away from Europe into a darker past.

I may be drunk by morning but that will not do any good. I shall take the train to Paris anyway. The train will be the same, the people, struggling for comfort and, even, dignity on the straight-backed, wooden, third-class seats will be the same, and I will be the same. We will ride through the same changing countryside northward, leaving behind the olive trees and the sea and all of the glory of the stormy southern sky, into the mist and rain of Paris. Someone will offer to share a sandwich with me, someone will offer me a sip of wine, someone will ask me for a match. People will be roaming the corridors outside, looking out of windows, looking in at us. At each stop, recruits in their baggy brown uniforms and colored hats will open the compartment door to ask Complet? We will all nod Yes, like conspirators, smiling faintly at each other as they continue through the train. Two or three of them will end up before our compartment door, shouting at each other in their heavy, ribald voices, smoking their dreadful army cigarettes. There will be a girl sitting opposite me who will wonder why I have not been flirting with her, who will be set on edge by the presence of the recruits. It will all be the same, only I will be stiller.

And the countryside is still tonight, this countryside reflected through my image in the pane. This house is just outside a small summer resort — which is still empty, the season has not yet begun. It is on a small hill, one can look down on the lights of the town and hear the thud of the sea. My girl, Hella, and I rented it in Paris, from photographs, some months ago. Now she has been gone a week. She is on the high seas now, on her way back to America.

I can see her, very elegant, tense, and glittering, surrounded by the light which fills the salon of the ocean liner, drinking rather too fast, and laughing, and watch- ing the men. That was how I met her, in a bar in Saint- Germain-des-Pres, she was drinking and watching, and that was why I liked her, I thought she would be fun to have fun with. That was how it began, that was all it meant to me; I am not sure now, in spite of everything, that it ever really meant more than that to me. And I don’t think it ever really meant more than that to her — at least not until she made that trip to Spain and, finding herself there, alone, began to wonder, perhaps, if a lifetime of drinking and watching the men was exactly what she wanted. But it was too late by that time. I was already with Giovanni. I had asked her to marry me before she went away to Spain; and she laughed and I laughed but that, somehow, all the same, made it more serious for me, and I persisted; and then she said she would have to go away and think about it. And the very last night she was here, the very last time I saw her, as she was packing her bag, I told her that I had loved her once and I made myself believe it. But I wonder if I had. I was thinking, no doubt, of our nights in bed, of the peculiar innocence and confidence, which will never come again, which had made those nights so delightful, so unrelated to past, present, or anything to come, so unrelated, finally, to my life since it was not necessary for me to take any but the most mechanical responsibility for them. And these nights were being acted out under a foreign sky, with no one to watch, no penalties attached — it was this last fact which was our undoing, for nothing is more unbearable, once one has it, than freedom. I suppose this was why I asked her to marry me: to give myself something to be moored to. Perhaps this was why, in Spain, she decided that she wanted to marry me. But people can’t, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, anymore than they can invent their parents. Life gives these and also takes them away and the great difficulty is to say Yes to life.

I was thinking, when I told Hella that I had loved her, of those days before anything awful, irrevocable, had happened to me, when an affair was nothing more than an affair. Now, from this night, this coming morning, no matter how many beds I find myself in between now and my final bed, I shall never be able to have any more of those boyish, zestful affairs — which are, really, when one thinks of it, a kind of higher, or, anyway, more pretentious masturbation. People are too various to be treated so lightly. I am too various to be trusted. If this were not so I would not be alone in this house tonight. Hella would not be on the high seas. And Giovanni would not be about to perish, sometime between this night and this morning, on the guillotine.

I repent now — for all the good it does — one particular lie among the many lies I’ve told, told, lived, and believed. This is the lie which I told to Giovanni but never succeeded in making him believe, that I had never slept with a boy before. I had. I had decided that I never would again. There is something fantastic in the spectacle I now present to myself of having run so far, so hard, across the ocean even, only to find myself brought up short once more before the bulldog in my own backyard — the yard, in the meantime, having grown smaller and the bulldog bigger.

I have not thought of that boy — Joey — for many years; but I see him quite clearly tonight. It was several years ago. I was still in my teens, he was about my age, give or take a year. He was a very nice boy, too, very quick and dark, and always laughing. For a while he was my best friend. Later, the idea that such a person could have been my best friend was proof of some horrifying taint in me. So I forgot him. But I see him very well tonight.

It was in the summer, there was no school. His parents had gone someplace for the weekend and I was spending the weekend at his house, which was near Coney Island, in Brooklyn. We lived in Brooklyn too, in those days, but in a better neighborhood than Joey’s. I think we had been lying around the beach, swimming a little and watching the near-naked girls pass, whistling at them and laughing. I am sure that if any of the girls we whistled at that day had shown any signs of responding, the ocean would not have been deep enough to drown our shame and terror. But the girls, no doubt, had some intimation of this, possibly from the way we whistled, and they ignored us. As the sun was setting we started up the boardwalk towards his house, with our wet bathing trunks on under our trousers.

And I think it began in the shower. I know that I felt something — as we were horsing around in that small, steamy room, stinging each other with wet towels — which I had not felt before, which mysteriously, and yet aimlessly, included him. I remember in myself a heavy reluctance to get dressed: I blamed it on the heat. But we did get dressed, sort of, and we ate cold things out of his icebox and drank a lot of beer. We must have gone to the movies. I can’t think of any other reason for our going out and I remember walking down the dark, tropical Brooklyn streets with heat coming up from the pavements and banging from the walls of houses with enough force to kill a man, with all the world’s grownups, it seemed, sitting shrill and dishevelled on the stoops and all the world’s children on the sidewalks or in the gutters or hanging from fire escapes, with my arm around Joey’s shoulder. I was proud, I think, because his head came just below my ear. We were walking along and Joey was making dirty wisecracks and we were laughing. Odd to remember, for the first time in so long, how good I felt that night, how fond of Joey.

When we came back along those streets it was quiet; we were quiet too. We were very quiet in the apartment and sleepily got undressed in Joey’s bedroom and went to bed. I fell asleep — for quite a while, I think. But I woke up to find the light on and Joey examining the pillow with great, ferocious care.

“What’s the matter?”

“I think a bedbug bit me.”

“You slob. You got bedbugs?”

“I think one bit me.”

“You ever have a bedbug bite you before?”

“No.”

“Well, go back to sleep. You’re dreaming.”

He looked at me with his mouth open and his dark eyes very big. It was as though he had just discovered that I was an expert on bedbugs. I laughed and grabbed his head as I had done God knows how many times before, when I was playing with him or when he had annoyed me. But this time when I touched him something happened in him and in me which made this touch different from any touch either of us had ever known. And he did not resist, as he usually did, but lay where I had pulled him, against my chest. And I realized that my heart was beating in an awful way and that Joey was trembling against me and the light in the room was very bright and hot. I started to move and to make some kind of joke but Joey mumbled something and I put my head down to hear. Joey raised his head as I lowered mine and we kissed, as it were, by accident. Then, for the first time in my life, I was really aware of another person’s body, of another person’s smell. We had our arms around each other. It was like holding in my hand some rare, exhausted, nearly doomed bird which I had miraculously happened to find. I was very frightened; I am sure he was frightened too, and we shut our eyes. To remember it so clearly, so painfully tonight tells me that I have never for an instant truly forgotten it. I feel in myself now a faint, a dreadful stirring of what so overwhelmingly stirred in me then, great thirsty heat, and trembling, and tenderness so painful I thought my heart would burst. But out of this astounding, intolerable pain came joy; we gave each other joy that night. It seemed, then, that a lifetime would not be long enough for me to act with Joey the act of love.
Copyright © 2001 by James Baldwin. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
“If Van Gogh was our 19th-century artist-saint, James Baldwin is our 20th-century one.”  —Michael Ondaatje
“A young American involved with both a woman and a man. . . . Baldwin writes of these matters with unusual candor and yet with such dignity and intensity.” —The New York Times

“Absorbing . . . [with] immediate emotional impact.”  —The Washington Post

“Mr. Baldwin has taken a very special theme and treated it with great artistry and restraint.” —Saturday Review

“Exciting ... a book that belongs in the top rank of fiction.” —The Atlantic

“Violent, excruciating beauty.” —San Francisco Chronicle

“To be James Baldwin is to touch on so many hidden places in Europe, America, the Negro, the white man —to be forced to understand so much.”   —Alfred Kazin

“This author retains a place in an extremely select group; that composed of the few genuinely indispensable American writers.”  —Saturday Review

“He has not himself lost access to the sources of his being —which is what makes him read and awaited by perhaps a wider range of people than any other major American writer.”  —The Nation

“He is thought-provoking, tantalizing, irritating, abusing and amusing.  And he uses words as the sea uses waves, to flow and beat, advance and retreat, rise and take a bow in disappearing . . . the thought becomes poetry and the poetry illuminates thought.”   —Langston Hughes

“He has become one of the few writers of our time.”  —Norman Mailer

About

Set in the 1950s Paris of American expatriates, liaisons, and violence, a young man finds himself caught between desire and conventional morality. With a sharp, probing imagination, James Baldwin's now-classic narrative delves into the mystery of loving and creates a moving, highly controversial story of death and passion that reveals the unspoken complexities of the human heart.

“If Van Gogh was our 19th-century artist-saint, James Baldwin is our 20th-century one.” —Michael Ondaatje

“A young American involved with both a woman and a man. . . . Baldwin writes of these matters with unusual candor and yet with such dignity and intensity.” —The New York Times

“Absorbing . . . [with] immediate emotional impact.” —The Washington Post

“Mr. Baldwin has taken a very special theme and treated it with great artistry and restraint.” —Saturday Review

“Exciting . . . a book that belongs in the top rank of fiction.” —The Atlantic

“Violent, excruciating beauty.” —San Francisco Chronicle

“To be James Baldwin is to touch on so many hidden places in Europe, America, the Negro, the white man —to be forced to understand so much.” —Alfred Kazin

“This author retains a place in an extremely select group; that composed of the few genuinely indispensable American writers.” —Saturday Review

“He has not himself lost access to the sources of his being —which is what makes him read and awaited by perhaps a wider range of people than any other major American writer.” —The Nation

“He is thought-provoking, tantalizing, irritating, abusing and amusing. And he uses words as the sea uses waves, to flow and beat, advance and retreat, rise and take a bow in disappearing . . . the thought becomes poetry and the poetry illuminates thought.” —Langston Hughes

“He has become one of the few writers of our time.” —Norman Mailer

Author

© The Granger Collection
James Baldwin (1924–1987) was a novelist, essayist, playwright, poet, and social critic. His first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, appeared in 1953 to excellent reviews, and his essay collections Notes of a Native Son and The Fire Next Time were bestsellers that made him an influential figure in the growing civil rights movement. Baldwin spent much of his life in France, where he moved to escape the racism and homophobia of the United States. He died in France in 1987, a year after being made a Commander of the French Legion of Honor. View titles by James Baldwin

Excerpt

I stand at the window of this great house in the south of France as night falls, the night which is leading me to the most terrible morning of my life. I have a drink in my hand, there is a bottle at my elbow. I watch my reflection in the darkening gleam of the window pane. My reflection is tall, perhaps rather like an arrow, my blond hair gleams. My face is like a face you have seen many times. My ancestors conquered a continent, pushing across death-laden plains, until they came to an ocean which faced away from Europe into a darker past.

I may be drunk by morning but that will not do any good. I shall take the train to Paris anyway. The train will be the same, the people, struggling for comfort and, even, dignity on the straight-backed, wooden, third-class seats will be the same, and I will be the same. We will ride through the same changing countryside northward, leaving behind the olive trees and the sea and all of the glory of the stormy southern sky, into the mist and rain of Paris. Someone will offer to share a sandwich with me, someone will offer me a sip of wine, someone will ask me for a match. People will be roaming the corridors outside, looking out of windows, looking in at us. At each stop, recruits in their baggy brown uniforms and colored hats will open the compartment door to ask Complet? We will all nod Yes, like conspirators, smiling faintly at each other as they continue through the train. Two or three of them will end up before our compartment door, shouting at each other in their heavy, ribald voices, smoking their dreadful army cigarettes. There will be a girl sitting opposite me who will wonder why I have not been flirting with her, who will be set on edge by the presence of the recruits. It will all be the same, only I will be stiller.

And the countryside is still tonight, this countryside reflected through my image in the pane. This house is just outside a small summer resort — which is still empty, the season has not yet begun. It is on a small hill, one can look down on the lights of the town and hear the thud of the sea. My girl, Hella, and I rented it in Paris, from photographs, some months ago. Now she has been gone a week. She is on the high seas now, on her way back to America.

I can see her, very elegant, tense, and glittering, surrounded by the light which fills the salon of the ocean liner, drinking rather too fast, and laughing, and watch- ing the men. That was how I met her, in a bar in Saint- Germain-des-Pres, she was drinking and watching, and that was why I liked her, I thought she would be fun to have fun with. That was how it began, that was all it meant to me; I am not sure now, in spite of everything, that it ever really meant more than that to me. And I don’t think it ever really meant more than that to her — at least not until she made that trip to Spain and, finding herself there, alone, began to wonder, perhaps, if a lifetime of drinking and watching the men was exactly what she wanted. But it was too late by that time. I was already with Giovanni. I had asked her to marry me before she went away to Spain; and she laughed and I laughed but that, somehow, all the same, made it more serious for me, and I persisted; and then she said she would have to go away and think about it. And the very last night she was here, the very last time I saw her, as she was packing her bag, I told her that I had loved her once and I made myself believe it. But I wonder if I had. I was thinking, no doubt, of our nights in bed, of the peculiar innocence and confidence, which will never come again, which had made those nights so delightful, so unrelated to past, present, or anything to come, so unrelated, finally, to my life since it was not necessary for me to take any but the most mechanical responsibility for them. And these nights were being acted out under a foreign sky, with no one to watch, no penalties attached — it was this last fact which was our undoing, for nothing is more unbearable, once one has it, than freedom. I suppose this was why I asked her to marry me: to give myself something to be moored to. Perhaps this was why, in Spain, she decided that she wanted to marry me. But people can’t, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, anymore than they can invent their parents. Life gives these and also takes them away and the great difficulty is to say Yes to life.

I was thinking, when I told Hella that I had loved her, of those days before anything awful, irrevocable, had happened to me, when an affair was nothing more than an affair. Now, from this night, this coming morning, no matter how many beds I find myself in between now and my final bed, I shall never be able to have any more of those boyish, zestful affairs — which are, really, when one thinks of it, a kind of higher, or, anyway, more pretentious masturbation. People are too various to be treated so lightly. I am too various to be trusted. If this were not so I would not be alone in this house tonight. Hella would not be on the high seas. And Giovanni would not be about to perish, sometime between this night and this morning, on the guillotine.

I repent now — for all the good it does — one particular lie among the many lies I’ve told, told, lived, and believed. This is the lie which I told to Giovanni but never succeeded in making him believe, that I had never slept with a boy before. I had. I had decided that I never would again. There is something fantastic in the spectacle I now present to myself of having run so far, so hard, across the ocean even, only to find myself brought up short once more before the bulldog in my own backyard — the yard, in the meantime, having grown smaller and the bulldog bigger.

I have not thought of that boy — Joey — for many years; but I see him quite clearly tonight. It was several years ago. I was still in my teens, he was about my age, give or take a year. He was a very nice boy, too, very quick and dark, and always laughing. For a while he was my best friend. Later, the idea that such a person could have been my best friend was proof of some horrifying taint in me. So I forgot him. But I see him very well tonight.

It was in the summer, there was no school. His parents had gone someplace for the weekend and I was spending the weekend at his house, which was near Coney Island, in Brooklyn. We lived in Brooklyn too, in those days, but in a better neighborhood than Joey’s. I think we had been lying around the beach, swimming a little and watching the near-naked girls pass, whistling at them and laughing. I am sure that if any of the girls we whistled at that day had shown any signs of responding, the ocean would not have been deep enough to drown our shame and terror. But the girls, no doubt, had some intimation of this, possibly from the way we whistled, and they ignored us. As the sun was setting we started up the boardwalk towards his house, with our wet bathing trunks on under our trousers.

And I think it began in the shower. I know that I felt something — as we were horsing around in that small, steamy room, stinging each other with wet towels — which I had not felt before, which mysteriously, and yet aimlessly, included him. I remember in myself a heavy reluctance to get dressed: I blamed it on the heat. But we did get dressed, sort of, and we ate cold things out of his icebox and drank a lot of beer. We must have gone to the movies. I can’t think of any other reason for our going out and I remember walking down the dark, tropical Brooklyn streets with heat coming up from the pavements and banging from the walls of houses with enough force to kill a man, with all the world’s grownups, it seemed, sitting shrill and dishevelled on the stoops and all the world’s children on the sidewalks or in the gutters or hanging from fire escapes, with my arm around Joey’s shoulder. I was proud, I think, because his head came just below my ear. We were walking along and Joey was making dirty wisecracks and we were laughing. Odd to remember, for the first time in so long, how good I felt that night, how fond of Joey.

When we came back along those streets it was quiet; we were quiet too. We were very quiet in the apartment and sleepily got undressed in Joey’s bedroom and went to bed. I fell asleep — for quite a while, I think. But I woke up to find the light on and Joey examining the pillow with great, ferocious care.

“What’s the matter?”

“I think a bedbug bit me.”

“You slob. You got bedbugs?”

“I think one bit me.”

“You ever have a bedbug bite you before?”

“No.”

“Well, go back to sleep. You’re dreaming.”

He looked at me with his mouth open and his dark eyes very big. It was as though he had just discovered that I was an expert on bedbugs. I laughed and grabbed his head as I had done God knows how many times before, when I was playing with him or when he had annoyed me. But this time when I touched him something happened in him and in me which made this touch different from any touch either of us had ever known. And he did not resist, as he usually did, but lay where I had pulled him, against my chest. And I realized that my heart was beating in an awful way and that Joey was trembling against me and the light in the room was very bright and hot. I started to move and to make some kind of joke but Joey mumbled something and I put my head down to hear. Joey raised his head as I lowered mine and we kissed, as it were, by accident. Then, for the first time in my life, I was really aware of another person’s body, of another person’s smell. We had our arms around each other. It was like holding in my hand some rare, exhausted, nearly doomed bird which I had miraculously happened to find. I was very frightened; I am sure he was frightened too, and we shut our eyes. To remember it so clearly, so painfully tonight tells me that I have never for an instant truly forgotten it. I feel in myself now a faint, a dreadful stirring of what so overwhelmingly stirred in me then, great thirsty heat, and trembling, and tenderness so painful I thought my heart would burst. But out of this astounding, intolerable pain came joy; we gave each other joy that night. It seemed, then, that a lifetime would not be long enough for me to act with Joey the act of love.
Copyright © 2001 by James Baldwin. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Praise

“If Van Gogh was our 19th-century artist-saint, James Baldwin is our 20th-century one.”  —Michael Ondaatje
“A young American involved with both a woman and a man. . . . Baldwin writes of these matters with unusual candor and yet with such dignity and intensity.” —The New York Times

“Absorbing . . . [with] immediate emotional impact.”  —The Washington Post

“Mr. Baldwin has taken a very special theme and treated it with great artistry and restraint.” —Saturday Review

“Exciting ... a book that belongs in the top rank of fiction.” —The Atlantic

“Violent, excruciating beauty.” —San Francisco Chronicle

“To be James Baldwin is to touch on so many hidden places in Europe, America, the Negro, the white man —to be forced to understand so much.”   —Alfred Kazin

“This author retains a place in an extremely select group; that composed of the few genuinely indispensable American writers.”  —Saturday Review

“He has not himself lost access to the sources of his being —which is what makes him read and awaited by perhaps a wider range of people than any other major American writer.”  —The Nation

“He is thought-provoking, tantalizing, irritating, abusing and amusing.  And he uses words as the sea uses waves, to flow and beat, advance and retreat, rise and take a bow in disappearing . . . the thought becomes poetry and the poetry illuminates thought.”   —Langston Hughes

“He has become one of the few writers of our time.”  —Norman Mailer

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    $17.00 US
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    A novel
    Kazuo Ishiguro
    $16.95 US
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    $16.00 US
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    Joan Didion
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Jan 25, 2022
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    Gore Vidal
    $18.00 US
    Paperback
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  • Season of Anomy
    Season of Anomy
    Wole Soyinka
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
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  • The Interpreters
    The Interpreters
    Wole Soyinka
    $16.95 US
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    $16.00 US
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    James Baldwin
    $22.00 US
    Hardcover
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    Ralph Ellison
    $25.00 US
    Hardcover
    May 25, 2021
  • Think, Write, Speak
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    Uncollected Essays, Reviews, Interviews, and Letters to the Editor
    Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov Literary Trust
    $18.00 US
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    The Wapshot Chronicle
    John Cheever
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Feb 02, 2021
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    Love in the Time of Cholera (Illustrated Edition)
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    $25.00 US
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  • The Scandal of the Century
    The Scandal of the Century
    And Other Writings
    Gabriel García Márquez
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
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  • Personal Writings
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    Albert Camus
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Aug 04, 2020
  • Berta Isla
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    A novel
    Javier Marías
    $17.00 US
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    Jul 07, 2020
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    Life for Sale
    Yukio Mishima
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Apr 07, 2020
  • The Source of Self-Regard
    The Source of Self-Regard
    Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations
    Toni Morrison
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Jan 14, 2020
  • Beloved
    Beloved
    Toni Morrison
    $32.00 US
    Hardcover
    Oct 22, 2019
  • Myra Breckinridge
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    Gore Vidal
    $18.00 US
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  • Warlight
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    Michael Ondaatje
    $16.95 US
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  • I'm Not Here to Give a Speech
    I'm Not Here to Give a Speech
    Gabriel García Márquez
    $14.95 US
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    The Myth of Sisyphus
    Albert Camus
    $15.00 US
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    Nov 06, 2018
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    And Other Writings
    Javier Marías
    $15.95 US
    Paperback
    Aug 28, 2018
  • Men Without Women
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    Haruki Murakami
    $16.95 US
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    A Novel
    Ha Jin
    $16.00 US
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    Haruki Murakami, Seiji Ozawa
    $18.00 US
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    Essays on Art
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    $20.00 US
    Paperback
    Jun 13, 2017
  • I Am Not Your Negro
    I Am Not Your Negro
    A Companion Edition to the Documentary Film Directed by Raoul Peck
    James Baldwin, Raoul Peck
    $16.00 US
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    Hear the Wind Sing and Pinball, 1973 (Two Novels)
    Haruki Murakami
    $17.00 US
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    Toni Morrison
    $16.00 US
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  • The Buried Giant
    The Buried Giant
    Kazuo Ishiguro
    $17.00 US
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  • Amnesia
    Amnesia
    Peter Carey
    $15.95 US
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    Kahlil Gibran
    $9.95 US
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    Jul 21, 2015
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    Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage
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    $16.95 US
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    Apr 14, 2015
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    The News: A User's Manual
    Alain De Botton
    $17.00 US
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    Dec 02, 2014
  • Paradise
    Paradise
    Toni Morrison
    $17.00 US
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    Mar 11, 2014
  • Go Tell It on the Mountain
    Go Tell It on the Mountain
    James Baldwin
    $16.00 US
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  • Dear Life
    Dear Life
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    Alice Munro
    $17.00 US
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  • The Complete Stories
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    $24.00 US
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    Truman Capote
    $24.00 US
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    Haruki Murakami
    $20.00 US
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  • Religion for Atheists
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    A Non-believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion
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    $18.00 US
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    Home
    Toni Morrison
    $16.00 US
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  • Through the Window
    Through the Window
    Seventeen Essays and a Short Story
    Julian Barnes
    $15.95 US
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  • The Remains of the Day
    The Remains of the Day
    Introduction by Salman Rushdie
    Kazuo Ishiguro
    $30.00 US
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    $15.95 US
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  • The Sense of an Ending
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    $17.00 US
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  • I Love a Broad Margin to My Life
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    Maxine Hong Kingston
    $16.00 US
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  • The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist
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    Understanding What Happens When We Write and Read Novels
    Orhan Pamuk
    $15.00 US
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    Glimpses of African Belief
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    Michael Ondaatje
    $24.95 US
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  • The Cross of Redemption
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    Uncollected Writings
    James Baldwin
    $18.00 US
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  • Ransom
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    David Malouf
    $16.00 US
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    $18.00 US
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  • MASTER HAROLD AND THE BOYS
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    A Play
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    A Dual-Language Edition
    Rainer Maria Rilke
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    Toni Morrison
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  • Dispatches
    Dispatches
    Introduction by Robert Stone
    Michael Herr
    $25.00 US
    Hardcover
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  • Travels with Herodotus
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    $16.00 US
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    Jun 10, 2008
  • The Architecture of Happiness
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    $20.00 US
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  • Love in the Time of Cholera
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    Gabriel García Márquez
    $17.00 US
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    Toni Morrison
    $16.00 US
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  • The Road
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    Cormac McCarthy
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  • Selected Poems of W. H. Auden
    Selected Poems of W. H. Auden
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    $18.00 US
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  • No Country for Old Men
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    Cormac McCarthy
    $17.00 US
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  • Mimi and Toutou's Big Adventure
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  • Never Let Me Go
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    Kazuo Ishiguro
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  • Kafka on the Shore
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    Haruki Murakami
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  • The Plot Against America
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    Philip Roth
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  • Too Brief a Treat
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    The Letters of Truman Capote
    Truman Capote
    $16.00 US
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  • Status Anxiety
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    Alain De Botton
    $16.95 US
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    May 10, 2005
  • Song of Solomon
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    Toni Morrison
    $17.00 US
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  • Sula
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    Toni Morrison
    $16.00 US
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  • The City and the Pillar
    The City and the Pillar
    A Novel
    Gore Vidal
    $16.95 US
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    Dec 02, 2003
  • The Razor's Edge
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    W. Somerset Maugham
    $17.00 US
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  • Julian
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    A Novel
    Gore Vidal
    $18.95 US
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    Aug 12, 2003
  • You're an Animal, Viskovitz
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  • Selected Essays of John Berger
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  • The Shape of a Pocket
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    John Berger
    $16.00 US
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    Mar 11, 2003
  • A New World Order
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    Essays
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  • A Wild Sheep Chase
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    A Novel
    Haruki Murakami
    $17.00 US
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    Apr 09, 2002
  • The Shadow of the Sun
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    $17.00 US
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    Apr 09, 2002
  • A Fine Balance
    A Fine Balance
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    $19.00 US
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    Nov 30, 2001
  • Quarrel & Quandary
    Quarrel & Quandary
    Essays
    Cynthia Ozick
    $15.00 US
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  • More Than I Love My Life
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    A novel
    David Grossman
    $17.00 US
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  • The Living Sea of Waking Dreams
    The Living Sea of Waking Dreams
    A novel
    Richard Flanagan
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Apr 26, 2022
  • Trio
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    A novel
    William Boyd
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Mar 08, 2022
  • Klara and the Sun
    Klara and the Sun
    A novel
    Kazuo Ishiguro
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Mar 01, 2022
  • Antiquities and Other Stories
    Antiquities and Other Stories
    Cynthia Ozick
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Mar 01, 2022
  • Let Me Tell You What I Mean
    Let Me Tell You What I Mean
    Joan Didion
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Jan 25, 2022
  • Palimpsest
    Palimpsest
    A Memoir
    Gore Vidal
    $18.00 US
    Paperback
    Nov 16, 2021
  • Season of Anomy
    Season of Anomy
    Wole Soyinka
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Sep 14, 2021
  • The Interpreters
    The Interpreters
    Wole Soyinka
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Sep 14, 2021
  • Here We Are
    Here We Are
    A novel
    Graham Swift
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Aug 10, 2021
  • The Fire Next Time
    The Fire Next Time
    James Baldwin
    $22.00 US
    Hardcover
    Jul 06, 2021
  • Juneteenth
    Juneteenth
    A Novel
    Ralph Ellison
    $25.00 US
    Hardcover
    May 25, 2021
  • Think, Write, Speak
    Think, Write, Speak
    Uncollected Essays, Reviews, Interviews, and Letters to the Editor
    Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov Literary Trust
    $18.00 US
    Paperback
    Feb 09, 2021
  • The Wapshot Chronicle
    The Wapshot Chronicle
    John Cheever
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Feb 02, 2021
  • Love in the Time of Cholera (Illustrated Edition)
    Love in the Time of Cholera (Illustrated Edition)
    Gabriel García Márquez
    $25.00 US
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  • The Scandal of the Century
    The Scandal of the Century
    And Other Writings
    Gabriel García Márquez
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Sep 15, 2020
  • Personal Writings
    Personal Writings
    Albert Camus
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Aug 04, 2020
  • Berta Isla
    Berta Isla
    A novel
    Javier Marías
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Jul 07, 2020
  • Life for Sale
    Life for Sale
    Yukio Mishima
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Apr 07, 2020
  • The Source of Self-Regard
    The Source of Self-Regard
    Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations
    Toni Morrison
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Jan 14, 2020
  • Beloved
    Beloved
    Toni Morrison
    $32.00 US
    Hardcover
    Oct 22, 2019
  • Myra Breckinridge
    Myra Breckinridge
    Gore Vidal
    $18.00 US
    Paperback
    May 21, 2019
  • Warlight
    Warlight
    Michael Ondaatje
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Apr 02, 2019
  • I'm Not Here to Give a Speech
    I'm Not Here to Give a Speech
    Gabriel García Márquez
    $14.95 US
    Paperback
    Jan 08, 2019
  • The Myth of Sisyphus
    The Myth of Sisyphus
    Albert Camus
    $15.00 US
    Paperback
    Nov 06, 2018
  • Between Eternities
    Between Eternities
    And Other Writings
    Javier Marías
    $15.95 US
    Paperback
    Aug 28, 2018
  • Men Without Women
    Men Without Women
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    Haruki Murakami
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    May 01, 2018
  • The Boat Rocker
    The Boat Rocker
    A Novel
    Ha Jin
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Oct 17, 2017
  • Absolutely on Music
    Absolutely on Music
    Conversations
    Haruki Murakami, Seiji Ozawa
    $18.00 US
    Paperback
    Oct 03, 2017
  • Keeping an Eye Open
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    Essays on Art
    Julian Barnes
    $20.00 US
    Paperback
    Jun 13, 2017
  • I Am Not Your Negro
    I Am Not Your Negro
    A Companion Edition to the Documentary Film Directed by Raoul Peck
    James Baldwin, Raoul Peck
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Feb 07, 2017
  • Wind/Pinball
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    Hear the Wind Sing and Pinball, 1973 (Two Novels)
    Haruki Murakami
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    May 03, 2016
  • God Help the Child
    God Help the Child
    Toni Morrison
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Jan 26, 2016
  • The Buried Giant
    The Buried Giant
    Kazuo Ishiguro
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Jan 05, 2016
  • Amnesia
    Amnesia
    Peter Carey
    $15.95 US
    Paperback
    Dec 08, 2015
  • The Prophet
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    Kahlil Gibran
    $9.95 US
    Paperback
    Jul 21, 2015
  • Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage
    Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage
    Haruki Murakami
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    May 05, 2015
  • The Narrow Road to the Deep North
    The Narrow Road to the Deep North
    Richard Flanagan
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Apr 14, 2015
  • The News: A User's Manual
    The News: A User's Manual
    Alain De Botton
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Dec 02, 2014
  • Paradise
    Paradise
    Toni Morrison
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Mar 11, 2014
  • Go Tell It on the Mountain
    Go Tell It on the Mountain
    James Baldwin
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Sep 12, 2013
  • Dear Life
    Dear Life
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    Alice Munro
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Jul 30, 2013
  • The Complete Stories
    The Complete Stories
    Truman Capote
    $24.00 US
    Hardcover
    May 07, 2013
  • In Cold Blood
    In Cold Blood
    Truman Capote
    $24.00 US
    Hardcover
    Feb 19, 2013
  • 1Q84
    1Q84
    Haruki Murakami
    $20.00 US
    Paperback
    Jan 22, 2013
  • Religion for Atheists
    Religion for Atheists
    A Non-believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion
    Alain De Botton
    $18.00 US
    Paperback
    Jan 08, 2013
  • Home
    Home
    Toni Morrison
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Jan 01, 2013
  • Through the Window
    Through the Window
    Seventeen Essays and a Short Story
    Julian Barnes
    $15.95 US
    Paperback
    Nov 20, 2012
  • The Remains of the Day
    The Remains of the Day
    Introduction by Salman Rushdie
    Kazuo Ishiguro
    $30.00 US
    Hardcover
    Oct 02, 2012
  • The Cat's Table
    The Cat's Table
    Michael Ondaatje
    $15.95 US
    Paperback
    Jun 12, 2012
  • The Sense of an Ending
    The Sense of an Ending
    Julian Barnes
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    May 29, 2012
  • I Love a Broad Margin to My Life
    I Love a Broad Margin to My Life
    Maxine Hong Kingston
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Feb 14, 2012
  • The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist
    The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist
    Understanding What Happens When We Write and Read Novels
    Orhan Pamuk
    $15.00 US
    Paperback
    Nov 01, 2011
  • The Masque of Africa
    The Masque of Africa
    Glimpses of African Belief
    V. S. Naipaul
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Oct 04, 2011
  • Nemesis
    Nemesis
    Philip Roth
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Oct 04, 2011
  • The English Patient
    The English Patient
    Introduction by Pico Iyer
    Michael Ondaatje
    $24.95 US
    Hardcover
    Oct 04, 2011
  • The Cross of Redemption
    The Cross of Redemption
    Uncollected Writings
    James Baldwin
    $18.00 US
    Paperback
    Sep 06, 2011
  • Ransom
    Ransom
    A Novel
    David Malouf
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Jan 25, 2011
  • On the Beach
    On the Beach
    Nevil Shute
    $18.00 US
    Paperback
    Feb 09, 2010
  • MASTER HAROLD AND THE BOYS
    MASTER HAROLD AND THE BOYS
    A Play
    Athol Fugard
    $14.00 US
    Paperback
    Oct 13, 2009
  • Duino Elegies & The Sonnets to Orpheus
    Duino Elegies & The Sonnets to Orpheus
    A Dual-Language Edition
    Rainer Maria Rilke
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Oct 06, 2009
  • A Mercy
    A Mercy
    Toni Morrison
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Aug 11, 2009
  • Dispatches
    Dispatches
    Introduction by Robert Stone
    Michael Herr
    $25.00 US
    Hardcover
    Feb 17, 2009
  • Travels with Herodotus
    Travels with Herodotus
    Ryszard Kapuscinski
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Jun 10, 2008
  • The Architecture of Happiness
    The Architecture of Happiness
    Alain De Botton
    $20.00 US
    Paperback
    Apr 08, 2008
  • Love in the Time of Cholera
    Love in the Time of Cholera
    Gabriel García Márquez
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Oct 05, 2007
  • The Bluest Eye
    The Bluest Eye
    Toni Morrison
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    May 08, 2007
  • The Road
    The Road
    Cormac McCarthy
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Mar 28, 2007
  • Selected Poems of W. H. Auden
    Selected Poems of W. H. Auden
    W. H. Auden
    $18.00 US
    Paperback
    Feb 13, 2007
  • No Country for Old Men
    No Country for Old Men
    Cormac McCarthy
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Jul 11, 2006
  • Mimi and Toutou's Big Adventure
    Mimi and Toutou's Big Adventure
    The Bizarre Battle of Lake Tanganyika
    Giles Foden
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Mar 14, 2006
  • Last Night
    Last Night
    James Salter
    $15.95 US
    Paperback
    Mar 14, 2006
  • Never Let Me Go
    Never Let Me Go
    Kazuo Ishiguro
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Mar 14, 2006
  • Kafka on the Shore
    Kafka on the Shore
    Haruki Murakami
    $18.00 US
    Paperback
    Jan 03, 2006
  • The Plot Against America
    The Plot Against America
    Philip Roth
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Sep 27, 2005
  • Too Brief a Treat
    Too Brief a Treat
    The Letters of Truman Capote
    Truman Capote
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Sep 13, 2005
  • Status Anxiety
    Status Anxiety
    Alain De Botton
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    May 10, 2005
  • Song of Solomon
    Song of Solomon
    Toni Morrison
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Jun 08, 2004
  • Sula
    Sula
    Toni Morrison
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Jun 08, 2004
  • The City and the Pillar
    The City and the Pillar
    A Novel
    Gore Vidal
    $16.95 US
    Paperback
    Dec 02, 2003
  • The Razor's Edge
    The Razor's Edge
    W. Somerset Maugham
    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Sep 09, 2003
  • Julian
    Julian
    A Novel
    Gore Vidal
    $18.95 US
    Paperback
    Aug 12, 2003
  • You're an Animal, Viskovitz
    You're an Animal, Viskovitz
    Alessandro Boffa
    $14.00 US
    Paperback
    Jun 17, 2003
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    Selected Essays of John Berger
    John Berger
    $21.00 US
    Paperback
    Mar 11, 2003
  • The Shape of a Pocket
    The Shape of a Pocket
    John Berger
    $16.00 US
    Paperback
    Mar 11, 2003
  • A New World Order
    A New World Order
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    Caryl Phillips
    $15.00 US
    Paperback
    Apr 30, 2002
  • A Wild Sheep Chase
    A Wild Sheep Chase
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    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Apr 09, 2002
  • The Shadow of the Sun
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    $17.00 US
    Paperback
    Apr 09, 2002
  • A Fine Balance
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    $19.00 US
    Paperback
    Nov 30, 2001
  • Quarrel & Quandary
    Quarrel & Quandary
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    $15.00 US
    Paperback
    Nov 13, 2001

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  • Giovanni's Room
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  • Native Sons
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    Paperback
    Jul 26, 2005
  • Vintage Baldwin
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    James Baldwin
    $13.00 US
    Paperback
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  • Just Above My Head
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    Jun 13, 2000
  • Blues for Mister Charlie
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    James Baldwin
    $15.00 US
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