Gary

The Swerve

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The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (Paperback)

By Stephen Greenblatt
$16.95
ISBN: 9780393343403
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: W. W. Norton & Company - September 4th, 2012

A veritable intellectual historical thriller concerning the wire-thin survival into modern times of Lucretius' On the Nature of Things - an astonishingly humanist view arrived at centuries before the Enlightenment. It reads like a novel, and reminds us of how tenuous can be the survival of ideas - especially when a power structure like the Roman Church is trying to obliterate them.


Gary

Medicus

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Medicus: A Novel of the Roman Empire (The Medicus Series #1) (Paperback)

By Ruth Downie
$18.00
ISBN: 9781596914278
Availability: Hard to Find--Contact us for More Info
Published: Bloomsbury USA - March 11th, 2008

Of our three favorite "Ancient Rome proto-detective" series, Steven Saylor has great historical figure portraits, Lindsay Davis has a bit o' the music hall and Ruth Downie has Tula - the Celt slave of the army doctor/investigator Gaius Ruso.  Slave she may (start out to) be, but she causes no end of...complications for our hero.  Medicus is the 1st book of the series, all of which are vastly satisfying.

Gary

Walk on the Wild Side

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A Walk on the Wild Side: A Novel (Paperback)

By Nelson Algren, Russell Banks (Foreword by)
$18.00
ISBN: 9780374525323
Availability: Available at Warehouse
Published: Farrar, Straus and Giroux - June 24th, 1998

Oh, the raw and wonderful goodies to be had in this social realist vaudeville!  Algren's depression Texas & New Orleans was too harsh when it first appeared, but nowadays on the far side of McCarthy, Crews, Bukowski and any number of other poets of the demi-monde (and the weird South), the book stands as a vernacular classic.

Gary

Outer Dark

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Outer Dark (Vintage International) (Paperback)

By Cormac McCarthy
$16.00
ISBN: 9780679728733
Availability: Available at Warehouse
Published: Vintage - June 29th, 1993

Poleaxed by Blood Meridian?  Outer Dark is from McCarthy's earlier Appalachian cycle (Suttree: the truly shocking Child of God), and there is already the strange integrity of animalistic primitives, prose you can roll around in and a near-mystic, received evil menacing everything.  Possibly the closest of his works to approach Meridian.


Gary

Popular Crime

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Popular Crime: Reflections on the Celebration of Violence (Paperback)

By Bill James
$19.99
ISBN: 9781416552741
Availability: Available at Warehouse
Published: Scribner - May 8th, 2012

Lizzie Borden?  The Boston Strangler?  Sid Vicious & Nancy Spungen?  A glom of the table of contents reveals just how many actual murders are in the popular consciousness, and Bill James (yes - he of the Baseball Abstract) has been contemplating causes, solutions and meanings for years.  Fans of true crime books (or regular mysteries for that matter) will find these articles enlightening, provocative and as grotesquely fascinating as their subjects.


Gary

Thinking the 20th Century

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Thinking the Twentieth Century (Hardcover)

By Tony Judt, Timothy Snyder
$36.00
ISBN: 9781594203237
Availability: It's Complicated--Contact Us for More Info
Published: Penguin Press HC, The - February 2nd, 2012

Judt, the late great author of Postwar, Past Imperfect etc. had been thinking long and deeply about history, Europe, America, and the state and weal of the world when he became ill and could not physically write. He produced this remarkable dialogue/rumination with historian Timothy Snyder via a unique long-form interview format.  Thought-provoking and full of intellectual pleasures.

Gary

The Patrick Melrose Novels

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The Patrick Melrose Novels: Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, and Mother's Milk (Paperback)

By Edward St Aubyn
$22.00
ISBN: 9780312429966
Availability: Hard to Find--Contact us for More Info
Published: Picador USA - January 31st, 2012

Brideshead meets Sade, with a touch of Lord Henry Wotton, a bit of a Brit snob Trainspotting and even, within a carapace of disdain, heart.  This quartet of short novels starts quietly, like a razor through silk, with 5-year-old Patrick an almost peripheral figure throwing into highlight his helplessly appalling aristo family.  Things go deliciously, decadently downhill from there.  Superb prose in service of an elegant black comedy bildungsroman.
Gary

Collusion by Stuart Neville

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Collusion: A Jack Lennon Investigation Set in Northern Ireland (Paperback)

By Stuart Neville
$14.00
ISBN: 9781569479858
Availability: It's Complicated--Contact Us for More Info
Published: Soho Crime - September 6th, 2011

Even if you'd assumed that ex-IRA hitman Jerry Fegan had nowhere to go but completely off the rails in Neville's excellent GHOSTS OF BELFAST, he shows up again in this equally superb sequel. And intense as he is, he's a supporting player - to a very intense situation.  (By the way - this guy is one of the best crime writers I've ever read.)


Gary

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