Peter S. Beagle: Mirror Kingdoms: The Best of Peter S. Beagle (Signed, Limited)

Book Details

• ISBN-13: 978-1-59606-291-7
• ISBN-10: 1596062916
• Language: English
• Publisher: Subterranean
• Limited Hardcover edition (February 28, 2010)
• Number: 27/250
• Signed by author
• New in a new mylar protector
• Price: $125.00 (includes postage)

About the book:

When New York Times Bestselling writer Tad Williams described Peter S. Beagle as a “bandit prince out to steal reader’s hearts” he touched on a truth that readers have known for fifty years. Beagle, whose work has touched generations of readers around the world, has spun rich, romantic and very funny tales that have beguiled and enchanted readers of all ages.


Undeniably, his most famous work is the much loved classic, The Last Unicorn, which tells of unicorn who sets off on quest to discover whether she is the last of her kind, and of the people she meets on her journey. Never prolific, The Last Unicorn is one of only five novels Beagle has published since A Fine and Private Place appeared in 1960, and was followed by The Folk of the Air, The Innkeeper’s Song, and Tamsin.

During the first forty years of his career Beagle also wrote a small handful, scarcely a dozen, short stories. Classics like “Come Lady Death”, “Lila and the Werewolf”, “Julie’s Unicorn”, “Professor Gottesman and the Indian Rhinoceros”, and the tales that make up Giant Bones. And then, starting just five years ago, he turned his attention to short fiction in earnest, and produced a stunning array of new stories including the Hugo and Nebula Award winning follow up to The Last Unicorn, “Two Hearts”, WSFA Small Press Award winner “El Regalo”, and wonderful stories like the surrealist “The Last and Only”, the haunting “The Rabbi’s Hobby” and others.

Mirror Kingdoms: The Best of Peter S. Beagle collects the very best of these stories, over 200,000 words worth, ranging across 45 years of his career from early stories to freshly minted tales that will surprise and amaze readers. It’s a book which shows, more than any other, just how successful this bandit prince from the streets of New York has been at stealing our hearts and underscores how much we hope he’ll keep on doing so.

Table of Contents:

• Professor Gottesman and the Indian Rhinoceros
• The Last and Only
• Come Lady Death
• El Regalo
• Julie’s Unicorn
• The Last Song of Sirit Byar
• Lila the Werewolf
• What Tune the Enchantress Plays
• Uncle Chaim and Aunt Rifke and the Angel
• Salt Wine
• Two Hearts
• Giant Bones
• King Pelles the Sure
• Vanishing
• The Tale of Junko and Sayuri
• The Rock in the Park
• We Never Talk About My Brother
• The Rabbi’s Hobby

Margaret Atwood : The Year of the Flood: A Novel (Signed)

Book Details:

• 
  
  Hardcover: 448 pages
• 
  
  Publisher: Nan A. Talese; First US Edition (September 22, 2009)
• 
  
  Language: English
• 
  
  ISBN-10: 0385528779
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  ISBN-13: 978-0385528771
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  Product Dimensions: 9.8 x 6.6 x 1.6 inches
• 
  
  Price : $50.00, postage included.

ABOUT THIS BOOK

The long-awaited new novel from Margaret Atwood. The Year of the Flood is a dystopic masterpiece and a testament to her visionary power.

The times and species have been changing at a rapid rate, and the social compact is wearing as thin as environmental stability. Adam One, the kindly leader of the God's Gardeners—a religion devoted to the melding of science and religion, as well as the preservation of all plant and animal life—has long predicted a natural disaster that will alter Earth as we know it. Now it has occurred, obliterating most human life. Two women have survived: Ren, a young trapeze dancer locked inside the high-end sex club Scales and Tails, and Toby, a God's Gardener barricaded inside a luxurious spa where many of the treatments are edible.

Have others survived? Ren's bioartist friend Amanda? Zeb, her eco-fighter stepfather? Her onetime lover, Jimmy? Or the murderous Painballers, survivors of the mutual-elimination Painball prison? Not to mention the shadowy, corrupt policing force of the ruling powers . . .

Meanwhile, gene-spliced life forms are proliferating: the lion/lamb blends, the Mo'hair sheep with human hair, the pigs with human brain tissue. As Adam One and his intrepid hemp-clad band make their way through this strange new world, Ren and Toby will have to decide on their next move. They can't stay locked away . . .

By turns dark, tender, violent, thoughtful, and uneasily hilarious, The Year of the Flood is Atwood at her most brilliant and inventive.

Lorrie Moore : A Gate at The Stairs (Signed)

Book Details:

• Hardcover: 336 pages
• Publisher: Knopf; First Edition (September 1, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375409289
• ISBN-13: 978-0375409288
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.9 x 1.4 inches
• Price: $50.00 postage incluced

ABOUT THIS BOOK



In her best-selling story collection, Birds of America (“[it] will stand by itself as one of our funniest, most telling anatomies of human love and vulnerability” —James McManus, front page of The New York Times Book Review), Lorrie Moore wrote about the disconnect between men and women, about the precariousness of women on the edge, and about loneliness and loss.

Now, in her dazzling new novel—her first in more than a decade—Moore turns her eye on the anxiety and disconnection of post-9/11 America, on the insidiousness of racism, the blind-sidedness of war, and the recklessness thrust on others in the name of love.

As the United States begins gearing up for war in the Middle East, twenty-year-old Tassie Keltjin, the Midwestern daughter of a gentleman hill farmer—his “Keltjin potatoes” are justifiably famous—has come to a university town as a college student, her brain on fire with Chaucer, Sylvia Plath, Simone de Beauvoir.

Between semesters, she takes a job as a part-time nanny. The family she works for seems both mysterious and glamorous to her, and although Tassie had once found children boring, she comes to care for, and to protect, their newly adopted little girl as her own.

As the year unfolds and she is drawn deeper into each of these lives, her own life back home becomes ever more alien to her: her parents are frailer; her brother, aimless and lost in high school, contemplates joining the military. Tassie finds herself becoming more and more the stranger she felt herself to be, and as life and love unravel dramatically, even shockingly, she is forever changed.

This long-awaited new novel by one of the most heralded writers of the past two decades is lyrical, funny, moving, and devastating; Lorrie Moore’s most ambitious book to date—textured, beguiling, and wise.

E. L. Doctorow : Homer & Langley: A Novel (Signed)

Book Details:

• Hardcover: 224 pages
• Publisher: Random House; First Edition (September 1, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1400064945
• ISBN-13: 978-1400064946
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.6 x 1 inches
• Price: $50.00 postage included.

 ABOUT THIS BOOK



From Ragtime and Billy Bathgate to The Book of Daniel, World’s Fair, and The March, the novels of E. L. Doctorow comprise one of the most substantive achievements of modern American fiction. Now, with Homer & Langley, this master novelist has once again created an unforgettable work.

Homer and Langley Collyer are brothers–the one blind and deeply intuitive, the other damaged into madness, or perhaps greatness, by mustard gas in the Great War. They live as recluses in their once grand Fifth Avenue mansion, scavenging the city streets for things they think they can use, hoarding the daily newspapers as research for Langley’s proposed dateless newspaper whose reportage will be as prophecy. Yet the epic events of the century play out in the lives of the two brothers–wars, political movements, technological advances–and even though they want nothing more than to shut out the world, history seems to pass through their cluttered house in the persons of immigrants, prostitutes, society women, government agents, gangsters, jazz musicians . . . and their housebound lives are fraught with odyssean peril as they struggle to survive and create meaning for themselves.

Brilliantly conceived, gorgeously written, this mesmerizing narrative, a free imaginative rendering of the lives of New York’s fabled Collyer brothers, is a family story with the resonance of myth, an astonishing masterwork unlike any that have come before from this great writer.

Richard Russo : That Old Cape Magic (Signed)

Product Details:

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: Knopf; First Edition (August 4, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375414967
• ISBN-13: 978-0375414961
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.5 x 1.1 inches
• Price: $50.00 postage included.

ABOUT THIS BOOK
Following Bridge of Sighs—a national best seller hailed by The Boston Globe as “an astounding achievement” and “a masterpiece”—Richard Russo gives us the story of a marriage, and of all the other ties that bind, from parents and in-laws to children and the promises of youth.

Griffin has been tooling around for nearly a year with his father’s ashes in the trunk, but his mother is very much alive and not shy about calling on his cell phone. She does so as he drives down to Cape Cod, where he and his wife, Joy, will celebrate the marriage of their daughter Laura’s best friend. For Griffin this is akin to driving into the past, since he took his childhood summer vacations here, his parents’ respite from the hated Midwest. And the Cape is where he and Joy honeymooned, in the course of which they drafted the Great Truro Accord, a plan for their lives together that’s now thirty years old and has largely come true. He’d left screenwriting and Los Angeles behind for the sort of New England college his snobby academic parents had always aspired to in vain; they’d moved into an old house full of character; and they’d started a family. Check, check and check.

But be careful what you pray for, especially if you manage to achieve it. By the end of this perfectly lovely weekend, the past has so thoroughly swamped the present that the future suddenly hangs in the balance. And when, a year later, a far more important wedding takes place, their beloved Laura’s, on the coast of Maine, Griffin’s chauffeuring two urns of ashes as he contends once more with Joy and her large, unruly family, and both he and she have brought dates along. How in the world could this have happened?


That Old Cape Magic is a novel of deep introspection and every family feeling imaginable, with a middle-aged man confronting his parents and their failed marriage, his own troubled one, his daughter’s new life and, finally, what it was he thought he wanted and what in fact he has. The storytelling is flawless throughout, moments of great comedy and even hilarity alternating with others of rueful understanding and heart-stopping sadness, and its ending is at once surprising, uplifting and unlike anything this Pulitzer Prize winner has ever written.

Al Gore : Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis (Signed)

Product Details:

• Paperback: 416 pages
• Publisher: Rodale Books; Original edition (November 3, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1594867348
• ISBN-13: 978-1594867347
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 7.4 x 1 inches
• Price : $60.00, postage included.

Jeff Somers : The Electric Church (Advance Reading Copy)

From Publishers Weekly



Somers packs his techno-thriller debut with enough gunplay and explosions to satisfy a Hollywood producer. Earth is now the System of Federated Nations, governed by the Joint Council and policed by local cops and the hard-nosed System Security Force (SSF). Most people are have-nots, struggling to get by through any means. Avery Cates is one of them, a respected 27-year-old bodyguard and assassin for hire working in Old New York. When Avery kills a cop by mistake, SSF chief Richard Marin hauls him in and gives him two choices: execution or taking on the Herculean task of assassinating the founder of the Electric Church, which creates converts by killing people and transplanting their brains into robot bodies that quash free will. The job would be a lot easier if Avery wasn't being hunted by a couple of cops who don't know when to quit. Somers's plot sprints along through the nicely detailed (if slightly unoriginal) world, but the characters are the real prize in this entertaining near-future noir.

Amy Bloom : Where the God of Love Hangs Out (Signed)

Book Details

• Hardcover: 224 pages
• Publisher: Random House (January 12, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1400063574
• ISBN-13: 978-1400063574
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1.1 inches
• Price: $50.00

Condition Notes
 First edition, first printing. As new/As new  in a new Mylar protector. Signed by Author on title page.

From Publishers Weekly:

Bloom's latest collection (after novel Away) looks at love in many forms through a keenly perceptive lens. Two sets of stories that read much like novellas form the book's soul; the first of which revolves around two couples—William and Isabel, Clare and Charles—and begins with Clare and William falling into an affair that endures divorces, remarriage and illness. Bloom has an unsettling insight into her character's minds: Clare's self-disgust is often reflected in her thoughts about William, demonstrating the complexity of their attraction as their comfort with each other grows, until she finally accepts the beauty of what they have—albeit too late. The second set of stories, featuring Lionel and Julia, is more complicated; the death of Lionel's father propels Lionel and Julia together in a night of grief, remarkable (and icky) mostly because Julia is Lionel's stepmother and his father's widow. As years go by, it is unclear whether Lionel's difficulties are due to that indiscretion, but watching Bloom work Lionel, Julia and her son through the rocky aftermath is a delight.

John Banville : The Infinities (Signed)

Book Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Knopf (February 23, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0307272796
• ISBN-13: 978-0307272799
• Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.8 x 1.2 inches
• Price: $50 (includes Media Mail postage)

Condition Notes


As new/as new. Signed by author (no inscription).  In a new Mylar protector.


From Publishers Weekly


Starred Review. Having apparently exorcised his taste for bloody intrigue with his pseudonym, Benjamin Black, Banville returns to high form (and his given name) with a novel even more pristine than his Booker-winning The Sea. Old Adam Godley lies dying, flying through his past on the way to eternity while his brooding son (also named Adam) sleepwalks through his marriage to the amorous Helen, and young Adam's loony sister, Petra, writes an encyclopedia of human morbidity. But Adam and his brood are not alone, nor is our narrator any detached third person: the gods are afoot, chiefly Hermes, disguised as a farmer, whispering to us of mortal love, guiding old Adam on his way, and laying bare all the Godleys' secrets while divine Zeus conducts illicit amours with Helen. Hermes assures us that mortal speech is barely articulate gruntings, yet Banville has the perfect instrument for his textured prose, almost never as finely tuned as this. The narrative is rife with asides, but it is to the common trajectory of a life that—despite the noise crowding ailing Adam's repose—it lends its most consoling notes, elevating the temporal and profane to the holy eternal.

Andre Dubus : Selected Stories of Andre Dubus (Signed, then Inscribed)

From Publishers Weekly:



Dubus, known as one of our most accomplished storytellers, has in his own life recently experienced some of the terrible things that customarily happen in his fiction (last year a car accident cost him a leg). In this fine collection of 23 stories, an iron-pumping hothead terrorizes and rapes his ex-wife; ("The Pretty Girl"); a sadistic Marine sergeant destroys a green recruit; ("Cadence"); a drunken youth kicks his girlfriend to death and leaves her body in the snow. ("Townies"). "New Hampshire is also a redneck state," observes one character. Yet the disorderly lives of these small-town or suburban denizens are rendered in a calm, richly textured, minutely detailed style. Dubus gets under the skin of a 19-year-old baseball pitcher whose wife ditches him for her dentist, a waitress emotionally scarred by her husband's death in Korea, an obese woman who rationalizes her secret gorging on sweets, a divorcing disc jockey coming to terms with his misogyny. Many of these tales are set in his favorite fictional territory northwest of Boston, yet an equal number span the map from Virginia to Texas to California. With unflinching candor Dubus explores the uneasy accommodations of marriage and adultery, the self-deceptions of middle age and the terrors of childhood.

Peter Straub : The Skylark (Signed Limited Edition)

In the fall of 1966, a group of students, led by a charismatic wanderer named Spencer Mallon, meet in a deserted field outside of Madison, Wisconsin. Their purpose: to conduct an “experiment” that will, if successful, alter the nature of reality itself. The outcome of that experiment is astonishing and inexplicable, and will affect the destinies of everyone involved in fundamental ways

The Skylark remains the clearest expression of the author’s original intentions. With precision, delicacy, and great narrative power, it traces the endless reverberations of a single catastrophic event. In the process, it takes us deep into the lives of a diverse group of fully realized characters, among them a thief, a killer, a best-selling novelist, and a magnetic, luminously beautiful blind woman--the skylark of the title. The result is both a visionary novel about the mystery and terror that lie beneath the surface of the visible world and a moving account of believable people struggling to come to terms with the defining moments of their lives. Moving effortlessly, and with great authority, between the past and the present, the magical and the mundane, The Skylark is the kind of intense, wholly absorbing reading experience that only Peter Straub could have created.

The Subterranean Press edition of The Skylark is approximately 200 manuscript pages longer than the trade edition, to be published as A Dark Matter.

Arturo Perez-Reverte : The Club Dumas (Signed Limited Edition)

Gelernter : Mirror Worlds Or: The Day Software Puts the Universe in a Shoebox...How It Will Happen and What It Will Mean

From the jacket:

Technology doesn't flow smoothly; it's the big surprises that matter, and Yale computer expert David Gelernter sees one such giant leap right on the horizon. Today's small scale software programs are about to be joined by vast public software works that will revolutionize computing and transform society as a whole. One such vast program is the "Mirror World."

Imagine looking at your computer screen and seeing reality--an image of your city, for instance, complete with moving traffic patterns, or a picture that sketches the state of an entire far-flung corporation at this second. These representations are called Mirror Worlds, and according to Gelernter they will soon be available to everyone. Mirror Worlds are high-tech voodoo dolls: by interacting with the images, you interact with reality. Indeed, Mirror Worlds will revolutionize the use of computers, transforming them from (mere) handy tools to crystal balls which will allow us to see the world more vividly and see into it more deeply. Reality will be replaced gradually, piece-by-piece, by a software imitation; we will live inside the imitation; and the surprising thing is--this will be a great humanistic advance. We gain control over our world, plus a huge new measure of insight and vision. 

In this fascinating book--part speculation, part explanation--Gelernter takes us on a tour of the computer technology of the near future. Mirror Worlds, he contends, will allow us to explore the world in unprecedented depth and detail without ever changing out of our pajamas. A hospital administrator might wander through an entire medical complex via a desktop computer. Any citizen might explore the performance of the local schools, chat electronically with teachers and other Mirror World visitors, plant software agents to report back on interesting topics; decide to run for the local school board, hire a campaign manager, and conduct the better part of the campaign itself--all by interacting with the Mirror World.

Gelernter doesn't just speculate about how this amazing new software will be used--he shows us how it will be made, explaining carefully and in detail how to build a Mirror World using technology already available. We learn about "disembodied machines," "trellises," "ensembles," and other computer components which sound obscure, but which Gelernter explains using familiar metaphors and terms. (He tells us that a Mirror World is a microcosm just like a Japanese garden or a Gothic cathedral, and that a computer program is translated by the computer in the same way a symphony is translated by a violinist into music.)

Mirror Worlds offers a lucid and humanistic account of the coming software revolution, told by a computer scientist at the cutting edge of his field.

Greenspun : Travels with Samantha

From the author's website:

"This book is about the summer I spent seeing North America, meeting North Americans, and trying to figure out how people live," writes Greenspun after losing his companion. You'll come face to face with examples of the stunning ethnic, scenic, and cultural richness of the continent.

Meet both sides of the language war in Montreal, bored youths in the Midwest, North Dakota Harley riders, struggling single mothers in the Yukon, and free spirits in Alaska. Join Greenspun as he travels up the spine of the Rocky Mountains into Canada and then up the Alaska Highway. Splash down in a float plane and spend a week with 20 bears.

Work your way through the Inside Passage on the Alaska Marine Highway, and get inside a salmon processing factory. See if Greenspun survives touring Vancouver, Vancouver Island, and the Pacific Northwest with old friends and new. Ask about polygamy in Salt Lake City, mountain bike the Slickrock Trail, and learn how to live with AIDS in Utah. Watch the waters recede from the Great Flood of '93 in St. Louis. Follow Greenspun back to Boston and MIT.

Behnke, Fladt, & Bachman : Fundamentals of Mathematics (3 Volume Set)

Fundamentals of Mathematics (3 Volume Set) by H. Behnke (Editor), K. Fladt (Editor), F. Bachmann (Editor)  $25.00

From the Publisher: Fundamentals of Mathematics represents a new kind of mathematical publication. While excellent technical treatises have been written about specialized fields, they provide little help for the nonspecialist; and other books, some of them semipopular in nature, give an overview of mathematics while omitting some necessary details. Fundamentals of Mathematics strikes a unique balance, presenting an irreproachable treatment of specialized fields and at the same time providing a very clear view of their interrelations, a feature of great value to students, instructors, and those who use mathematics in applied and scientific endeavors. Moreover, as noted in a review of the German edition in Mathematical Reviews, the work is “designed to acquaint [the student] with modern viewpoints and developments. The articles are well illustrated and supplied with references to the literature, both current and ‘classical.’” The outstanding pedagogical quality of this work was made possible only by the unique method by which it was written. There are, in general, two authors for each chapter: one a university researcher, the other a teacher of long experience in the German educational system. (In a few cases, more than two authors have collaborated.) And the whole book has been coordinated in repeated conferences, involving altogether about 150 authors and coordinators.

• Volume I opens with a section on mathematical foundations. It covers such topics as axiomatization, the concept of an algorithm, proofs, the theory of sets, the theory of relations, Boolean algebra, and antinomies. The closing section, on the real number system and algebra, takes up natural numbers, groups, linear algebra, polynomials, rings and ideals, the theory of numbers, algebraic extensions of a fields, complex numbers and quaternions, lattices, the theory of structure, and Zorn’s lemma.
• Volume II begins with eight chapters on the foundations of geometry, followed by eight others on its analytic treatment. The latter include discussions of affine and Euclidean geometry, algebraic geometry, the Erlanger Program and higher geometry, group theory approaches, differential geometry, convex figures, and aspects of topology.
• Volume III, on analysis, covers convergence, functions, integral and measure, fundamental concepts of probability theory, alternating differential forms, complex numbers and variables, points at infinity, ordinary and partial differential equations, difference equations and definite integrals, functional analysis, real functions, and analytic number theory. An important concluding chapter examines “The Changing Structure of Modern Mathematics

Thomas N. Scortia : Artery of Fire

Duda and Hart : Pattern Classification and Scene Analysis

PATTERN CLASSIFICATION AND SCENE ANALYSIS: Duda, Richard O.; Hart, Peter E.


A long-standing, essential classic. If you work in PR, you need a copy just to chase down references to it. Contents are well-described by the jacket blurb, appended below.


Price: $50.00 (includes Media Mail shipping in the US)


Details:
Pub. Date: January 1973
Publisher: Wiley, John & Sons, Incorporated
Format: Hardcover, 482pp
ISBN-13: 9780471223610
ISBN: 0471223611
Edition: First Edition, 4th Printing



Condition: Very Good in a Very Good jacket. No marks or highlights, but has a bookplate and owner name stamps put in before the bookplate. Light wear to the edges of the boards. Dust jacket a little worn, in a Mylar protector.

(From the jacket) Here is a unified, comprehensive, and up-to-date treatment of the theoretical principles of pattern recognition. These principles are applicable to a great variety of problems of current interest, such as character recognition, speech recognition, speaker identification, fingerprint recognition, the analysis of biomedical photographs, aerial photoreconnaissance, automatic inspection for industrial quality control, and visual systems for robots. Throughout Pattern Classification and Scene Analysis, the authors have balanced their presentation to reflect the relative importance of the many theoretical topics in the field. Pattern Classification and Scene Analysis is the first book to provide comprehensive coverage of both statistical classification theory and computer analysis of pictures. Part I covers Bayesian decision theory, supervised and unsupervised learning, nonparametric techniques, discriminant analysis, and clustering. Part II describes many techniques of current interest in automatic scene analysis, including preprocessing of pictorial data, spatial filtering, shape-description techniques, perspective transformations, projective invariants, linguistic procedures, and artificial intelligence techniques for scene analysis. Although the theories and techniques of pattern recognition are largely mathematical, the authors have been more concerned with providing insight and understanding than with establishing rigorous mathematical foundations. The many illustrative examples, plausibility arguments, and discussions of the behavior of solutions reflect this concern. Extensive bibliographical and historical remarks at the end of each chapter further enhance the presentation. Standard notation is used wherever possible, and a comprehensive index is included. Typical first-year graduate students will find most of the mathematical arguments well within their grasp. Because the exposition is clear and balanced, Pattern Classification and Scene Analysis is suitable for both college and professional use. In particular, it will appeal to graduate students and professionals in the fields of computer science, electrical engineering, and statistics. Students and professionals in psychology, biomedical science, meteorology, and biology will also find it of value for the light it sheds on such areas as visual perception, image processing, and numerical taxonomy.

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