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The Landmark Herodotus: The Histories by Herodotus . New York. 2007. Pantheon Books. 9780375421099. Edited by Robert B. Strassler. A New Translation by Andrea L. Purvis. Introduction by Rosalind Thomas.  959 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Kim Llewellyn. Jacket map by Edward Wells from 'A New Set of Maps'. 

 
9780375421099DESCRIPTION - From the editor of the widely praised The Landmark Thucydides, a new Landmark Edition of The Histories by Herodotus, the greatest classical work of history ever written. Herodotus was a Greek historian living in Ionia during the fifth century BCE. He traveled extensively through the lands of the Mediterranean and the Black Sea and collected stories, and then recounted his experiences with the varied people and cultures he encountered. Cicero called him ‘the father of history,' and his only work, The Histories, is considered the first true piece of historical writing in Western literature. With lucid prose that harks back to the time of oral tradition, Herodotus set a standard for narrative nonfiction that continues to this day. In The Histories, Herodotus chronicles the rise of the Persian Empire and its dramatic war with the Greek city-states. Within that story he includes rich veins of anthropology, ethnography, geology, and geography, pioneering these fields of study, and explores such universal themes as the nature of freedom, the role of religion, the human costs of war, and the dangers of absolute power. Ten years in the making, The Landmark Herodotus gives us a new, dazzling translation by Andrea L. Purvis that makes this remarkable work of literature more accessible than ever before. Illustrated, annotated, and filled with maps, this edition also includes an introduction by Rosalind Thomas and twenty-one appendices written by scholars at the top of their fields,Herodotus covering such topics as Athenian government, Egypt, Scythia, Persian arms and tactics, the Spartan state, oracles, religion, tyranny, and women. Like The Landmark Thucydides before it, The Landmark Herodotus is destined to be the most readable and comprehensively useful edition of The Histories available.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Herodotus was a Greek historian who was born in Halicarnassus, Caria (modern-day Bodrum, Turkey) and lived in the fifth century BC (c. 484–425 BC). Widely referred to as 'The Father of History' (first conferred by Cicero), he was the first historian known to collect his materials systematically and critically, and then to arrange them into a historiographic narrative. The Histories - his masterpiece and the only work he is known to have produced - is a record of his 'inquiry', being an investigation of the origins of the Greco-Persian Wars and including a wealth of geographical and ethnographical information. Although some of his stories were fanciful and others inaccurate, he claimed he was reporting only what had been told to him. Little is known of his personal history.

 

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Hamlet by William Shakespeare. New York. 1980. Penguin Books. Edited by Professor T. J. B. Spencer. Introduced by Anne Barton. 384 pages. Cover illustration by Paul Hogarth. 0140707344.

 

The greatest of Shakespeare's plays. This Penguin edition has best notes in my opinion, even if one has to flip to the back of the book to read them.

 

0140707344FROM THE PUBLISHER -


   The Tragical History of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, or more simply Hamlet, is a tragedy by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written between 1599 and 1601. The play, set in the Kingdom of Denmark, recounts how Prince Hamlet exacts revenge on his uncle Claudius, firstly for murdering the old King Hamlet (Claudius's brother and Prince Hamlet's father) and secondly for then succeeding to the throne and marrying Gertrude (the King Hamlet's widow and mother of Prince Hamlet). The play vividly portrays real and feigned madness - from overwhelming grief to seething rage - and explores themes of treachery, revenge, incest, and moral corruption.

Shakespeare William William Shakespeare (26 April 1564 (baptised) – 23 April 1616) was an English poet, playwright, and actor, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the 'Bard of Avon'. His extant works, including some collaborations, consist of about 38 plays, 154 sonnets, two long narrative poems, and a few other verses, of which the authorship of some is uncertain. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright. Shakespeare was born and brought up in Stratford-upon-Avon. At the age of 18, he married Anne Hathaway, with whom he had three children: Susanna, and twins Hamnet and Judith. Between 1585 and 1592, he began a successful career in London as an actor, writer, and part-owner of a playing company called the Lord Chamberlain's Men, later known as the King's Men. He appears to have retired to Stratford around 1613 at age 49, where he died three years later. Few records of Shakespeare's private life survive, and there has been considerable speculation about such matters as his physical appearance, sexuality, religious beliefs, and whether the works attributed to him were written by others. Shakespeare produced most of his known work between 1589 and 1613. His early plays were mainly comedies and histories and these works remain regarded as some of the best work produced in these genres. He then wrote mainly tragedies until about 1608, including Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth, considered some of the finest works in the English language. In his last phase, he wrote tragicomedies, also known as romances, and collaborated with other playwrights. Many of his plays were published in editions of varying quality and accuracy during his lifetime. In 1623, John Heminges and Henry Condell, two friends and fellow actors of Shakespeare, published the First Folio, a collected edition of his dramatic works that included all but two of the plays now recognised as Shakespeare's. It was prefaced with a poem by Ben Jonson, in which Shakespeare is hailed, presciently, as 'not of an age, but for all time'. In the 20th and 21st century, his work has been repeatedly adopted and rediscovered by new movements in scholarship and performance. His plays remain highly popular today and are constantly studied, performed, and reinterpreted in diverse cultural and political contexts throughout the world.


 

 

The Conservationist by Nadine Gordimer. New York. 1975. Viking Press. 067023883x. 288 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Craig Dodd.


067023883xDESCRIPTION - A wealthy industrialist, attractive to women and not yet fifty, Mehring wants for nothing that white privilege in a black country can bring him. With a luxury flat in the city and an expense-account farm in the country, what he is prepared at all costs to conserve is his way of life. Neither his Leftist mistress nor his long-haired schoolboy son - both of whose love he is confident he can do without - can shake his faith in his unalienable right to his possessions. No one successfully disputes his claims - not Jacobus and the other ragged black workers who tend his four hundred acres of the Transvaal, or the Indians who run the country store, or the Boer farmers who regard him as an amateur, or the 150,000 blacks who live in a segregated township between farm and city. Only the presence of a dead man, abandoned near the river, asserts that Africa, in the end, is something a white man can't buy. The Conservationist is a deeply fascinating study of a man both reckless and calculating, subconsciously seeking human alienation as a form of self-preservation. Because he has maneuvered himself into a position where life, he thinks, cannot move him, he sees himself asGordimer Nadine impregnable, the ultimate ‘conservationist' clinging to patterns that reassure him of his power. Played out in vivid counterpoint to Mehring's memories and fantasies are the lives of those who serve but scarcely notice him - his victims and his benefactors. And the overwhelming third presence is the calm beauty of the land they contend.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Nadine Gordimer (20 November 1923 - 13 July 2014) was a South African writer, political activist and recipient of the 1991 Nobel Prize in Literature. She was recognized as a woman "who through her magnificent epic writing has - in the words of Alfred Nobel - been of very great benefit to humanity". Gordimer's writing dealt with moral and racial issues, particularly apartheid in South Africa. Under that regime, works such as Burger's Daughter and July's People were banned. She was active in the anti-apartheid movement, joining the African National Congress during the days when the organization was banned, and gave Nelson Mandela advice on his famous 1964 defence speech at the trial which led to his conviction for life. She was also active in HIV/AIDS causes.

 

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Nabokov's Quartet by Vladimir Nabokov. New York. 1966. Phaedra. 104 pages. hardcover.  

nabokovs quartetDESCRIPTION - NABOKOV'S QUARTET is a collection of four of Vladimir Nabokov's short stories. The collection was first published by Phaedra, New York in 1966. It contains the following short stories: ‘An Affair of Honor‘; ‘Lik‘; ‘The Vane Sisters‘; ‘The Visit to the Museum.‘ The latter two were reprinted in 1968 in NABOKOV'S CONGERIES, and ‘Lik' and ‘The Vane Sisters' are included in TYRANTS DESTROYED AND OTHER STORIES (1975). All four stories were published again posthumously within THE STORIES OF VLADIMIR NABOKOV.

Nabokov VladimirAUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - VLADIMIR NABOKOV (1899-1977) was one of the twentieth century's greatest writers in Russian and English. Poet, novelist, dramatist, memoirist, critic, translator, essayist, and scientist, he was awarded the National Medal for Literature in 1973. He taught creative writing and Russian literature at Wellesley, Stanford, Cornell, and Harvard. Among his most celebrated works are LOLITA; PALE FIRE; ADA; SPEAK, MEMORY; and his translation of Pushkin's EUGENE ONEGIN.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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In the Shadow of Slavery: Africa's Botanical Legacy in the Atlantic World by Judith A. Carney and Richard Nicholas Rosomoff. Berkeley. 2009. University of California Press. 9780520257504. 10 color illustrations, 10 b/w photographs, 48 line illustrations. 296 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Janet Wood. Jacket illustration: Grass, Milk, and Food Vendors, illustrations by Carlos Julio, ca. 1776.

9780520257504DESCRIPTION - The transatlantic slave trade forced millions of Africans into bondage. Until the early nineteenth century, African slaves came to the Americas in greater numbers than Europeans. In the Shadow of Slavery provides a startling new assessment of the Atlantic slave trade and upends conventional wisdom by shifting attention from the crops slaves were forced to produce to the foods they planted for their own nourishment. Many familiar foods-millet, sorghum, coffee, okra, watermelon, and the ‘Asian' long bean, for example-are native to Africa, while commercial products such as Coca Cola, Worcestershire Sauce, and Palmolive Soap rely on African plants that were brought to the Americas on slave ships as provisions, medicines, cordage, and bedding. In this exciting,Carney Judith A original, and groundbreaking book, Judith A. Carney and Richard Nicholas Rosomoff draw on archaeological records, oral histories, and the accounts of slave ship captains to show how slaves' food plots–'botanical gardens of the dispossessed'–became the incubators of African survival in the Americas and Africanized the foodways of plantation societies.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Judith A. Carney is Professor of Geography at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the author of the award-winning book Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas. Richard Nicholas Rosomoff is an independent writer.

 

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Twenty-Five German Poets: A Bilingual Collection by Walter A. Kaufmann (translator and editor) . New York. 1975. Norton. 039304405x. Introduction by Walter Kaufmann. 325 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Rosalind Lorber.

039304405xDESCRIPTION - When this book was originally published, twenty poets were represented. For this edition, new material has been added, including additional poems by Goethe, Heine, and Nietzsche, as well as five poets not previously included. The book spans three centuries - opening with Angelus Silesius, Klopstock, Claudius, Goethe, and Schiller, and ending with Brecht and Boll - but it has considerable continuity. The prefaces for each of the twenty-five poets integrate the selections into a story, and often poems by different writers invite comparison. For example, almost all of the poets express an attitude toward death. Not only would many discussions of death be better if the authors had some inkling of the great variety of attitudes illustrated here, but one can also gain a better understanding of a poet's experience of life by comparing his attitude toward death with that of some other poets. The book should contribute to a better understanding of some of these twenty-five poets, of German literature, of intellectual history, and of some of the themes with which these poets deal.Kaufmann Walter A The sequence of the poets, and of the poems by each poet, is roughly chronological. Walter Kaufmann has made all the translations and has endeavored to capture the distinctive tone of each of the poets. The original German texts are printed on facing pages.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Walter Arnold Kaufmann (July 1, 1921, Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany - September 4, 1980, Princeton, NJ) was a professor of philosophy at Princeton University. He is the author, editor, or translator of many books on philosophy, religion, and poetry. His poetry has appeared in books and magazines, and he has contributed articles and essays to encyclopedias, books, and scholarly periodicals, including Partisan Review, Kenyon Review, Commentary, The New Leader, Harper's, and The American Scholar.

 

 

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The Coming of the French Revolution by Georges Lefebvre. Princeton. 1949. Princeton University Press. Translated from the French by R. R. Palmer. 233 pages. hardcover.   

coming of the french revolution 1949DESCRIPTION - FROM THE TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE - ‘The present book was written long enough ago to have become a classic. It concerns only the beginning of the French Revolution. Its author, Georges Lefebvre. published it early in 1939 in honor of the sesquicentennial of the Revolution of 1789. A few months later the Second World War began. The French Republic collapsed before the assault of Hitlerite Germany, and was succeeded by the Vichy regime that governed France until the liberation in 1945. No sympathetic understanding of the French Revolution was desired by the authorities of Vichy France, which drew their strongest support from anti-republican elements that were then significant in French political life. The Vichy government therefore suppressed the book and ordered some 8,000 copies burned, so that it remained virtually unknown in its own country until reprinted there in 1970, after its author's death. The present English translation appeared in 1947, as soon as possible after the Second World War. It has been widely read in English-speaking countries, where it is better known than in France itself. This new edition presents the translation of 1947 unchanged, but with a revised translator's preface and a few small changes in the translator's notes. What Lefebvre intended to mark the sesquicentennial of 1781 may now signalize its bicentennial fifty years later.'

Lefebvre GeorgesAUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Georges Lefebvre (6 August 1874 - 28 - August 1959) was a French historian, best known for his work on the French Revolution and peasant life. He coined the term 'history from below', which was later popularised by the British Marxist Historians, and the phrase the 'death certificate of the old order' to describe the Great Fear of 1789. Among his most significant works was the 1924 book Les Paysans du Nord pendant la REvolution française ('The Peasants of the North During the French Revolution'), which was the result of 20 years of research into the role of the peasantry during the revolutionary period. R. R. Palmer is Professor of History Emeritus at Yale University. He now lives in Princeton. New Jersey, where he taught at Princeton University from 1936 to 1963. His own books include TWELVE WHO RULED: THE COMMITTEE OF PUBLIC SAFETY IN THE FRENCH REVOLUTION and the two-volume THE AGE OF DEMOCRACTIC REVOLUTION, the first volume of which won the Bancroft Prize in 1960. He also edited and translated THE TWO TOCQUEVILLES, FATHER AND SON: HERVE AND ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE ON THE COMING OF THE FRENCH REVOUTION.

 

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To The Unknown Hero by Hans Erich Nossack. New York. 1974. Farrar Straus Giroux. hardcover. Jacket design by Lawrence Ratzkin. Translated from the German by Ralph Manheim. 0374278385.

 

0374278385FROM THE PUBLISHER -

 

   Hans Erich Nossack belongs to the extraordinary lineage of German writers that includes Hesse, Kafka, Rilke, and Novalis. Jean-Paul Sartre has called him ‘the most interesting contemporary German writer.’ TO THE UNKNOWN HERO, the third of his novels to be published in English, shows Nossack’s inimitable wry conscience in a comic mood that promises to delight the reader. The book is both an adventure story and a proof of the limitations of historiography. ‘Professor Precise,’ German pedant, had early in his in academic career written a 200-page treatise called ‘To the Unknown Hero,’ about a bit of German history, ten event-filled days in 1919 that paved the way to the Weimar Republic. The hero of this brief revolution, praised as a tactical and political genius, was a man known only as Comrade Hein, a mysterious figure who disappeared from the midst of the first assembly of victorious revolutionaries and was never heard from again. ‘Professor Precise,’ with filial pride, had presented his middle-class, grocer father with a copy of his published book - with surprising results, for the father clearly knew a great deal more about Comrade Rein than the son dreamed could be known. For a long time, however, the implication of his father’s knowledge was not clear to the arrogant scholar; and then, reluctantly but inevitably, he realizes that his search for the truth about Comrade Hein has only just begun and that it is his obligation to embark on a new investigation of his once lionized hero. The suspense of the story and the skill with which Nossack has woven together its complex elements give this book the succinctness and resonance of a parable of modern and revolutionary times. The Times Literary Supplement, in reviewing the German edition, said: ‘Nossack has written a splendidly humorous book in which the comic - and at times almost burlesque - element brilliantly focuses the essential discontinuity in life. He has always evinced a predilection for the comic and dramatic in his works, but never before have they been so overt.’ Nossack’s brisk prose style has been admirably re-created by Ralph Manheim.

Nossack Hans Erich

 

Hans Erich Nossack was born in Hamburg, Germany in 1901, and much of his writing was shaped by his relationship to his native city, where he died in 1976. His work was banned by the Nazi regime and most of his manuscripts were destroyed by the allied bombing of Hamburg in 1943. Hailed by Jean-Paul Sartre as one of the great German existentialist novelists, Hans Erich Nossack has long been considered a major writer throughout Europe. His essays, poems, plays and novels - of which TO THE UNKNOWN HERO, THE D’ARTHEZ CASE, AND THE IMPOSSIBLE PROOF have been translated into English - won him Europe’s most important literary prizes.

 


 

 

The Lew Archer mysteries of Ross MacDonald

 

moving_target_knopf_1949.jpgdrowning pool knopf 1950way some people die knopf 1951ivory grin knopf 1952find a victim knopf 1954barbarous coast knopf 1956doomsters knopf 1958galton case knopf 1959wycherly woman knopf 1961zebra striped hearse knopf 1962chill knopf 1964far side of the dollar knopf 1956black money knopf 1966instant enemy knopf 1968goodbye look knopf 1969039443467603944847460394404254

 

"Kenneth Millar, who published most of his novels under the name Ross Macdonald, was a master of all the kinds of devices and deceptions on which mystery fiction depends. Books like The Galton Case and The Chill and The Far Side of the Dollar remain unsurpassed for the deepening intricacy of their narratives, the awesomely engineered dovetailing of hidden relationships and long-buried crimes. In his work, as he explained to his editor Alfred A. Knopf, the mystery is far more than a puzzle to be solved: “Plot is important to me. I try to make my plots carry meaning, and this meaning such as it is determines and controls the movement of the story.” The meanings he explored expressed both the privations and troubles of his own youth in Canada and a larger vision of the guilt and raging discontent simmering not far beneath the surface of the apparently thriving Southern California where he spent his adult life. The puzzles he so brilliantly constructed culminate in revelations not far from the stark clarity of tragedy." - from the Library of America site (https://www.loa.org/writers/272-ross-macdonald/)

 

 

moving target knopf 1949The Moving Target. New York. 1949. Knopf. 245 pages. hardcover.

DESCRIPTION - The Moving Target is a 1949 mystery novel, written by Ross Macdonald, who at this point used the name John Macdonald. This is the first Ross Macdonald novel to feature the character of Lew Archer (for some reason changed to Lew Arless in this British edition) who would define the author's career. Lew Archer is hired by the dispassionate wife of an eccentric oil tycoon who has gone missing. Archer must dig through a strange cast of Los Angeles characters, finding crime after crime before he can get to the job he was hired to do. The novel became the basis for the 1966 Paul Newman film Harper, thanks in no small part to screenwriter William Goldman. Ross Macdonald (Kenneth Millar) originally titled this book The Snatch. When the book was published, he chose the pseudonym John Macdonald after his father, John Macdonald Millar. It is believed he didn't want to use his own name as his wife, Margaret Millar, was already an established writer. Due this pen-name's similarity with the name of the writer John D. MacDonald, Millar later wrote as John Ross Macdonald and finally as Ross Macdonald.



drowning pool knopf 1950The Drowning Pool. New York. 1950. Knopf. 244 pages. hardcover.

DESCRIPTION - Archer is hired by Maude Slocum to investigate a libelous letter accusing her of adultery. He begins his enquiry at the Californian town of Quinto, north of Los Angeles, where the Slocums live on a mesa above the seedy oil-boom town of Nopal Valley on the other side. Also in the house live Maude's mother-in-law Olivia, who holds the family's financial reins, as well as her effeminate son James, Maude's husband, and their vulnerable teenage daughter Cathy. When the millionaire matriarch is found floating face down in the family pool, the prime suspects are her good-for-nothing son and his seductive teenage daughter. In The Drowning Pool, Lew Archer takes this case in the L.A. suburbs and encounters a moral wasteland of corporate greed and family hatred—and sufficient motive for a dozen murders.

 

 

way some people die knopf 1951The Way Some People Die. New York. 1951. Knopf. 245 pages. hardcover.

DESCRIPTION - In a rundown house in Santa Monica, Mrs. Samuel Lawrence presses fifty crumpled bills into Lew Archer's hand and asks him to find her wandering daughter, Galatea. Described as ‘crazy for men' and without discrimination, she was last seen driving off with small-time gangster Joe Tarantine, a hophead hood with a rep for violence. Archer traces the hidden trail from San Francisco slum alleys to the luxury of Palm Springs, traveling through an urban wilderness of drugs and viciousness. As the bodies begin to pile up, he finds that even angel faces can mask the blackest of hearts. Filled with dope, delinquents and murder, this is classic Macdonald and one of his very best in the Lew Archer series.

 

 

 

ivory grin knopf 1952The Ivory Grin. New York. 1952. Knopf. 240 pages. hardcover.

DESCRIPTION - Lew Archer's empty wallet made him swallow the woman's phony story. And when he went looking for the girl she wanted found, he came up with a grisly love triangle where the price of desire added up to three: one body stabbed, one body shot and one body burned a crisp, dark brown. In The Ivory Grin, Macdonald again confirms his head-and-shoulders distinction in the mystery field. Here is a book to refute the charge that the detective has passed his peak in American fiction.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

find a victim knopf 1954Find a Victim. New York. 1954. Knopf. 215 pages. hardcover.

DESCRIPTION - Las Cruces wasn’t a place most travelers would think to stop. But after private investigator Lew Archer plays the good samaritan and picks up a bloodied hitchhiker, he finds himself in town for a few days awaiting a murder inquest. A hijacked truck full of liquor and an evidence box full of marijuana, $20,000 from a big-time bank heist by a small-time crook, corruption, adultery, incest, prodigal daughters, and abused wives all make the little town seem a lot more interesting than any guide book ever could. And as the murder rate rises, Archer finds himself caught up in mystery where everyone is a suspect and everyone’s a victim.

 

 



barbarous coast knopf 1956The Barbarous Coast. New York. 1956. Knopf. 247 pages. hardcover.

DESCRIPTION - THE BARBAROUS COAST is fast, tough, exciting, and brilliantly written. Set in Southern California, it takes Lew Archer in search of a girl who jackknifed too suddenly from high diving to high living and leads him to an ex-fighter with an unexplained movie contract, a big-time gambler with a producer for a cover, the ghost of an eighteen-year-old girl whose murder was never solved, and finally to an answer he would rather not have known.

 

 

 

 

 

 

doomsters knopf 1958The Doomsters. New York. 1958. Knopf. 251 pages. hardcover.

DESCRIPTION - The Doomsters is a 1958 mystery novel written by Ross Macdonald, the seventh book in the Lew Archer series. Archer is hired by drug addict Carl Hallman to investigate the deaths of his wealthy and influential parents. The title of the book is taken from the poem To an Unborn Pauper Child by Thomas Hardy. Breathe not, hid Heart: cease silently, And though thy birth-hour beckons thee, Sleep the long sleep: The Doomsters heap; Travails and teens around us here. The poem reflects on the difficulty of escaping the lot to which we are born and this is an underlying theme of MacDonald's book. Many sources agree that this book marked a turning point in the series, wherein Macdonald abandoned his imitations of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett and found his own voice. It also marks the fixing of Lew Archer's character as a man more interested in understanding the criminal than in catching him. Writing about the book in The New York Times, the critic Anthony Boucher called the book a study of the strands that shape complexity and doom and, talking about these strands, says it is an analysis at once compassionate and cruel giving dimension and meaning to an unusually well crafted mystery puzzle,

 

galton case knopf 1959The Galton Case. New York. 1959. Knopf. 186 pages. hardcover. 242 pages.

DESCRIPTION - Lew Archer returns in this gripping mystery, widely recognized as one of acclaimed mystery writer Ross Macdonald's very best, about the search for the long lost heir of the wealthy Galton family. Almost twenty years have passed since Anthony Galton disappeared, along with a suspiciously streetwise bride and several thousand dollars of his family's fortune. Now Anthony's mother wants him back and has hired Lew Archer to find him. What turns up is a headless skeleton, a boy who claims to be Galton's son, and a con game whose stakes are so high that someone is still willing to kill for them. Devious and poetic, The Galton Case displays MacDonald at the pinnacle of his form.

 

 

 

 

wycherly woman knopf 1961The Wycherly Woman. New York. 1961. Knopf. 278 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Muni Lieblein.

DESCRIPTION - Her name was Phoebe Wycherly. Her age was twenty-one. She was last seen alive at the San Francisco docks, three months before Lew Archer was hired to search for her. The search led him first to her family and her college friends, then far afield from the respectable and monied world where Phoebe had been brought up, into the criminal lower depths where her young life had apparently ended in violence. Ross Macdonald, whose powers as a storyteller deepen with each new book, has never given us a more absorbing tale. It is written with the grace and wit and passion of a good novel and moves with penetration and sympathy on all the diverse levels of modern society. The characters, ranging from a millionaire Stanford alumnus to an unemployed actress writing a true-confession autobiography, are freshly seen and corrosively etched. As always with Macdonald, the story combines brilliant paradox and tragic surprise. J

 

  

zebra striped hearse knopf 1962The Zebra-Striped Hearse. New York. 1962. Knopf. 278 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Paul Bacon.

DESCRIPTION - Harriet was a big girl, twenty-five on her next birthday, but her father, Colonel Blackwell, persisted in treating her as a little one. When she came back from Mexico with a man she planned to marry, the Colonel assumed this match could not be suitable. Burke Damis, the prospective bridegroom, claimed to be a serious painter. Harriet considered him a genius, but nobody else had ever heard of him. So the Colonel hired Archer to look into Damis's background. AImost at once he discovered the body of a man stabbed to death with an icepick. Meanwhile Damis and Harriet had dropped out of sight. The story moves with grace and speed and steadily mounting excitement across the map of California and through its society, from Los Angeles to the Bay area, from the American colony on Mexico's Lake Chapala to the floating population of gamblers and their girls on the south shore of Lake Tahoe. This is Mr. Macdonald's tenth book about the physical and moral adventures of Lew Archer, and perhaps the most fascinating of a brilliantly sustained, and widely acclaimed, series. Like Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett before him, Ross Macdonald writes for the general literate public. That mystery fans also like his work is all to the good.

  

 

chill knopf 1964The Chill. New York. 1964. Knopf. 280 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Arthur Hawkins.

DESCRIPTION - The Chill marks the eleventh appearance of Ross Macdonald's California detective, Lew Archer. Hired to trace a runaway bride, Archer uncovers a trail of murder that leads halfway across America and twenty years into the past. Beyond that, it need only be said that the story is every bit as exciting, baffling, and ultimately satisfying as would be expected from the author of The Zebra-Striped Hearse. In the direct line of succession that reaches from Dashiell Hammett to Raymond Chandler, Ross Macdonald adds, to the crackling dialogue and narrative tightness of his illustrious predecessors, impressive qualities of his own: a depth of psychological under- standing, a sureness in handling a wide variety of social milieus, and a dazzling, unpredictable plot. All this explains why Mr. Macdonald's novels "even appeal to people who don't ordinarily read mysteries," as Publishers' Weekly says, and why they are gaining an increasing audience among lovers of good fiction.

 

 

 
 

far side of the dollar knopf 1956The Far Side of the Dollar. New York. 1965. Knopf. 247 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Arthur Hawkins. 

DESCRIPTION - To the hard-boiled story of violence and death, Ross Macdonald has brought substance and depth of characterization. It is often said that he follows in the tradition of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, but Macdonald has actually broken new ground. His novels have a social range and moral dimension that, in combination with a striking prose style and narrative drive, provide the reader with a rewarding experience. In this new and moving novel, Lew Archer, Macdonald's celebrated California investigator, is hired by the principal of a private reform school, to trace a missing boy. What appears to be an ordinary matter of juvenile delinquency is suddenly magnified, as Archer plunges into a web of murder and extortion. He ranges all over the Far West, tracking down men and women who are pursuing the fast buck, and hating to be reminded of what is waiting on the far side of the last dollar.

 

   

  

 

black money knopf 1966Black Money. New York. 1966. Knopf. 241 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Adelson & Eichinger.

DESCRIPTION - Ross Macdonald's famous private detective, Lew Archer, is the kind of man you can drop a secret into and never hear it hit bottom. In his thirteenth and strangest case he explores the secret life of a rich California residential community. A beautiful young woman has jilted her fiance and taken up with a mysterious character who represents himself as a French political refugee. Hired to investigate this man, Archer becomes involved in several murders and a gigantic swindle, Running through the case, as a central theme in this morally disturbing novel, is the corrupting influence of the underworld and its money in our society. BLACK MONEY is the most individual of the brilliant series of novels that have won Ross Macdonald international recognition. Ross Macdonald was born near San Francisco in 1915. He was educated in Canadian schools, traveled widely in Europe, and acquired advanced degrees and a Phi Beta Kappa key at the University of Michigan. In 1938 he married a Canadian girl who is now well known as the novelist Margaret Millar. Mr. Macdonald (Kenneth Millar in private life) taught school and later college, and served as Communications Officer aboard an escort carrier in the Pacific, For the past twenty years he has lived in Santa Barbara and has written mystery novels about the explosively changing society of his native state. His main interests, outside of literature, are conservation and politics. He is the current president of Mystery Writers of America. In 1964 his novel THE CHILL was given a Silver Dagger award by the Crime Writers' Association of Great Britain, .

 

instant enemy knopf 1968The Instant Enemy. New York. 1968. Knopf. 227 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Muni Lieblein.

DESCRIPTION - Lew Archer is hired by Keith Sebastian, a Los Angeles business executive, to find his daughter Sandy, a high-school senior who has run off with a homeless boy. Sebastian and his wife, living on the edge of affluent bankruptcy, seem unable to communicate with their daughter. Archer finds the runaways easily enough, but before he can return Sandy to her parents, she has participated in a violent crime. Archer's efforts to save the girl from the consequences of her actions, and to understand those actions, involve him in a savage plot twisting deep into the past. At least one old murder and some new ones confound him and the police. Archer himself is very nearly killed by an ex-cop who wants to keep the case closed, but he finally manages to open it and let some daylight in. The Instant Enemy is Lew Archer at his toughest, and Ross Macdonald at his most trenchant in his observations of California society.

 

 

 

 

goodbye look knopf 1969The Goodbye Look. New York. 1969. Knopf. 243 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Summit Studios.

DESCRIPTION - Acknowledged master of the "whipcord thriller," Ross Macdonald is increasingly recognized as ' 'not only the best in his field but an important American novelist on any level" (Chicago Tribune). In his new novel, Macdonald's famous non-hero private eye Lew Archer—embodiment of cool—picks his way through the overheated and explosive mazes of a wealthy family's long-hidden secrets. Lew Archer is hired to investigate a burglary at the mansion of Irene and Larry Chalmers. The prime suspect is their son, Nick, who has a real talent for disappearing. As Archer zeros in on Nick, he discovers a troubled blonde, a stash of wartime letters, and a mysterious hobo. Then a dead body turns up in a car on an empty beach. And then Nick turns up with a Colt 45! A lost heirloom, a murder that breeds more murder, a boy's life poisoned by a money crime committed before he was born — these are the elements of The Goodbye Look- It is Ross Macdonald at his unnerving best: a novel at once brilliantly perceptive of the world it anatomizes—the freeway culture of Southern California—and from first to last unfaltering in its dramatic excitement and suspense.

 

  

 

0394434676The Underground Man. New York. 1971. Knopf. 0394434676. 272 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Hal Seigel.

DESCRIPTION - The Underground Man is Ross Macdonald at his most brilliant and brilliantly exciting. It is his first new novel since the best-selling and widely acclaimed The Goodbye Look—and it may well be the finest novel in what The New York Times has called "the finest series of detective novels ever written by an American." The Underground Man brings Macdonald's cool, pragmatic detective, Lew Archer, to a tragic fire that ravages a hillside community in South- ern California. It enmeshes him in the lives of a group of troubled people searching for happy endings but fatally entangled in a web of murder and extortion stretching back through fifteen years—an angry father whose whole life has been a kind of breakdown, a mother using her son as a scapegoat, a pair of alienated adolescents who believe they are rescuing a child from the adult world, and a sad woman living with a dreadful secret. The result is a novel that mingles unfaltering suspense with that extraordinary perception of an American life-style (West Coast Affluent) that is the hallmark of Ross Macdonald.

  

 

  

0394484746Sleeping Beauty. New York. 1973. Knopf. 0394484746. 271 pages. hardcover.

DESCRIPTION - In Sleeping Beauty, Lew Archer finds himself the confidant of a wealthy, violent family with a load of trouble on their hands - including an oil spill, a missing girl, a lethal dose of Nembutal, a six-figure ransom, and a stranger afloat, face down, off a private beach. Here is Ross Macdonald's masterful tale of buried memories, the consequences of arrogance, and the anguished relations between parents and their children. Riveting, gritty, tautly written, Sleeping Beauty is crime fiction at its best. If any writer can be said to have inherited the mantle of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, it is Ross Macdonald. Between the late 1940s and his death in 1983, he gave the American crime novel a psychological depth and moral complexity that his predecessors had only hinted at. And in the character of Lew Archer, Macdonald redefined the private eye as a roving conscience who walks the treacherous frontier between criminal guilt and human sin.

 

 

0394404254The Blue Hammer. New York. 1976. Knopf. 0394404254. 270 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Hal Siegel.

DESCRIPTION - MacDonald's last novel featuring his celebrated California private detective Lew Archer. The theft of a valuable painting. The long-ago disappearance of a famous artist. A murder as deceptive as a magician's illusion. A horrendous - but now buried - explosion of family hatred. These are the nerve centers of Ross Macdonald's magnificent new Lew Archer novel, the richest we have had from the author of "the best detective novels ever written by an American" (The New York Times)—a fusion of unfaltering suspense with dramatic revelation of the way lives are shaped and mis-shaped in the flow of time, in the hidden and dangerous emotional currents beneath the surface of family history. The time is now; the place, Southern California. The stolen canvas that Archer has been hired to retrieve is reputed to be the work of the celebrated Richard Chantry, who vanished in 1950 from his home in Santa Teresa. It is the portrait of an unknown woman—and on its trail Archer moves with edgy competence among the intrigues of dealers and collectors. Until suddenly he finds himself drawn into a web of family complications and masked brutalities stretching back fifty years through a world where money talks or buys silence, where social prominence is a murderous weapon, where, behind the plausible facades of homes not quite broken but badly bent, a heritage of lies and evasions pushes troubled men and women deeper into trouble. And as he pursues the Chantry portrait—and the larger mystery of Richard Chantry—Archer him- self is shaken as never before: Archer the solitary traveler, the loner who has through the years deliberately addressed himself to the deciphering of other people's lives, is thrust into an inescapable encounter with a woman who will complicate his own.... From its almost hushed beginning to its violent climax and its unexpected—indeed astonishing resolution. The Blue Hammer holds us riveted. This is Ross MacDonald at his incomparable best.

 

 

 

 

 

Archer short story collections

 

 

bantam the name is archer 1295The Name is Archer New York. 1955. Bantam Books. 194 pages. paperback. 1295. Cover by Mitch Hooks.

DESCRIPTION - Lew Archer, private detective in the land of dreams - California; in the land of peaches and honey, misery and murder - male and femaie! The name is Archer and don’t get me wrong - It’s not that women are greedier than men, No, it’s not that, necessarily, or even that they cause more trouble than men, it’s just that - well - If you stick a lighted match into a barrel of gasoline something’s going to happen, and as far as men are concerned that’s what women are - a lighted match. Take the case of The Guilt-Edged Blonde or the Gone Girl or - better yet, just turn the page - and don’t forget - the name is Archer. The Name Is Archer is a collection of short stories written by Ross Macdonald and featuring his detective hero, Lew Archer. Originally compiled in 1955 and published under the name John Ross Macdonald, more stories were added in later collections under different titles. The stories that first appeared in The Name Is Archer were as follows: Find the Woman (originally titled Death by Air in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, June 1946); Gone Girl (original title Imaginary Blonde, Manhunt, February 1953); The Bearded Lady, (American Magazine, October 1948); The Suicide (original title The Beat-Up Sister, Manhunt, October 1953); Guilt-Edged Blonde (Manhunt, January 1954); Wild Goose Chase (Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, July 1954).

 

0892960337Lew Archer: Private Investigator by Ross MacDonald. New York. 1977. Mysterious Press. . 254 pages. hardcover.

DESCRIPTION - Lew Archer, the quintessential American detective, is the most famous private eye in contemporary literature. In the tradition of Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe and Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade, Archer is a hard-boiled dick - but one with greater compassion than his predecessors. Lonely, cynical and introspective, Archer moves in the Southern California milieu, unraveling the complex mysteries of other people’s lives. This is the first hardcover edition of Lew Archer short stories, and the first complete collection, with a new introduction by the author..

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

9781932009637The Archer Files, The Complete Short Stories of Lew Archer, Private Investigator Including Newly Discovered Case Notes by Ross MacDonald. Norfolk. 2012. Crippen & Landru. 9781932009637. Edited by Tom Nolan. 351 pages. paperback. Cover art by Jeff Wong (after Mitch Hooks).

DESCRIPTION - Ross Macdonald (1915-1983) was the author of eighteen books that a New York Times critic called the finest series of detective novels ever written by an American : the Lew Archer canon, which included such breakthrough best-sellers as The Underground Man, The Goodbye Look, and The Blue Hammer.  Macdonald (born Kenneth Millar) also wrote several novelettes and short-stories involving Southern California private-detective Lew Archer. The Archer Files for the first time collects all the brief Archer fiction: the stories from Macdonald s 1955 paperback-original The Name Is Archer, the additional tales included in the Otto Penzler-edited 1977 volume Lew Archer: Private Investigator, and the three then-unknown novellas presented in Crippen & Landru s 2001 book Strangers in Town. Also included in The Archer Files are several lengthy, never-before-published fragments of unfinished Macdonald stories: case notes, as it were, from the files of Lew Archer. Edited by Macdonald biographer Tom Nolan, The Archer Files is prefaced with Nolan s biographical sketch of Lew Archer himself -- the character Eudora Welty described as a champion and a distinguished creation ... As a detective and as a man he takes the human situation with full seriousness.  Jeff Wong s cover is adapted from the 1955 paperback original, but depicting Ross Macdonald rather than Lew Archer.

 

 

Archer anthologies

 

 

archer in hollywood knopf 1967Archer in Hollywood: The Moving Target, the Way Some People Die, the Barbarous Coast. New York. 1967. Knopf. 676 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Jean Carlu.

DESCRIPTION - This first omnibus of novels by Ross Macdonald presents his famous detective, Lew Archer, in three stylish and explosive cases. They take Archer and the reader through the upper levels and lower depths of California society, casting a sardonic eye on Hollywood and its outposts in Las Vegas and Palm Springs. In The Moving Target (recently made into the hit movie Harper) the disappearance of an oil millionaire with Hollywood connections touches off a series of violent crimes. In The Way Some People Die Lew Archer tracks down some missing persons, living and dead, on a trail that twists from Palm Springs to San Francisco. In The Barbarous Coast Archer's pursuit of a girl who jackknifed too suddenly from high diving to high living leads him to an ex-fighter with an unexplained movie contract, a bigtime gambler who died by his own knife, and finally to an answer he would rather not have known.

 

 

 

 

archer at large knopf 1970Archer at Large: Three Great Lew Archer Novels of Suspense - the Galton Case, the Chill, Black Money. New York. 1970. Knopf. 626 pages. hardcover.

DESCRIPTION - With the publication in 1969 of The Goodbye Look, Ross Macdonald's brilliant series of Lew Archer novels achieved extraordinary public recognition as one of the great creations in the con- temporary literature of suspense. Greeted with unqualified praise on the front page of The New York Times Book Review, The Goodbye Look soon became a nationwide bestseller, and for more than three months held its place as one of the country's leading fiction successes. Its publication also helped maintain and increase interest in the earlier Lew Archer books—most of which continue to find readers in both hardcover and paperback editions- Now three of the finest Macdonald thrillers are reissued in this superb collection, a companion volume to the Archer in Hollywood omni- bus of 1%7- In The Galton Case, Archer is asked to find Maria Galton's lost son, and his search carries him across the continent and back through a tangle of scarred families. In The Chill, the private detective's job is to locate a bride who walked out on her investigations lead to three apparently unconnected murders, with the year's most startling surprise solution (The New York Times). In Black Money, when a beautiful young woman jilts her fiancé and takes up with a presumed French political refugee, Archer becomes involved in several murders and a gigantic swindle that underscores the corrupting influence of the underworld and its money in our society. Altogether, a boon for Ross Macdonald fans, old and new.

 

0394508041Archer in Jeopardy: The Doomsters, the Zebra-Striped Hearse, and the Instant Enemy. New York. 1979. Knopf. 0394508041. 757 pages. hardcover.

DESCRIPTION - Crime novelist without peer (‘author of the best detective novels ever written by an American’—The New York Times Book Review) Ross Macdonald has been acclaimed equally for his mastery of suspense, for his vision of the family as a complex and mysterious organism moving through time, and for the stunning perception of a kind of American life that resonates, always, through his novels—the freeway culture of Southern California, from opulent old money and the beach-cabana luxury of the new rich to the threadbare melancholy of shabby backstreet bars. Macdonald’s unforgettable detective is Lew Archer—the wearily wise, infinitely resourceful private investigator who so often finds in the tangled past, with its long-buried guilty secrets, a fertile source of clues to the murderous present- Archer, whose very humanity puts him constantly in jeopardy. He is at his incomparable best in the three splendid novels brought together here: The Doomsters, The Zebra-Striped Hearse, and The Instant Enemy.

 


MacDonald RossAUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Ross Macdonald is the pseudonym of the American-Canadian writer of crime fiction Kenneth Millar (December 13, 1915 - July 11, 1983). He is best known for his series of hardboiled novels set in southern California and featuring private detective Lew Archer. Brought up in Ontario, he eventually settled in California, where he died in 1983.

 

 

 


 

 

 

Ubik by Philip K. Dick. New York. 1970. Dell Books. 208 pages. paperback. 9200. Cover illustration: Jones. 

  
dell ubik 9200DESCRIPTION -

Who is Ubik? What is Ubik? Where is Ubik? You'll never guess, You'll have to find out, as the extraordinary Philip K. Dick opens up new dimensions in science fiction adventure. Ubik is a 1969 science fiction novel by American writer Philip K. Dick. The story is set in a future 1992 where psychic powers are utilized in corporate espionage, while cryonic technology allows recently deceased people to be maintained in a lengthy state of hibernation. It follows Joe Chip, a technician at a psychic agency who begins to experience strange alterations in reality that can be temporarily reversed by a mysterious store-bought substance called Ubik. This work expands upon characters and concepts previously introduced in the vignette "What the Dead Men Say". Ubik is one of Dick's most acclaimed novels. In 2009, it was chosen by Time magazine as one of the 100 greatest novels since 1923. In his review for Time, critic Lev Grossman described it as "a deeply unsettling existential horror story, a nightmare you'll never be sure you've woken up from".

 

Dick Philip KPhilip Kindred Dick (December 16, 1928 – March 2, 1982) was an American novelist, short story writer and essayist whose published work is almost entirely in the science fiction genre. Dick explored sociological, political and metaphysical themes in novels dominated by monopolistic corporations, authoritarian governments, and altered states. In his later works Dick's thematic focus strongly reflected his personal interest in metaphysics and theology. He often drew upon his own life experiences in addressing the nature of drug abuse, paranoia, schizophrenia, and transcendental experiences in novels such as A Scanner Darkly and VALIS. The novel The Man in the High Castle bridged the genres of alternate history and science fiction, earning Dick a Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1963. Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, a novel about a celebrity who awakens in a parallel universe where he is unknown, won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for best novel in 1975. ‘I want to write about people I love, and put them into a fictional world spun out of my own mind, not the world we actually have, because the world we actually have does not meet my standards,’ Dick wrote of these stories. ‘In my writing I even question the universe; I wonder out loud if it is real, and I wonder out loud if all of us are real.’ In addition to 44 published novels, Dick wrote approximately 121 short stories, most of which appeared in science fiction magazines during his lifetime. Although Dick spent most of his career as a writer in near-poverty, ten popular films based on his works have been produced, including Blade Runner, Total Recall, A Scanner Darkly, Minority Report, Paycheck, Next, Screamers, and The Adjustment Bureau. In 2005, Time magazine named Ubik one of the one hundred greatest English-language novels published since 1923. In 2007, Dick became the first science fiction writer to be included in The Library of America series.

 


 

 

 


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