Teddy J.D. Salinger New Yorker Magazine, New York, Jan. 31, 1953 Due to its unhappy ending, Teddy is definitely one of Salinger’s most controversial stories. This 1953 New Yorker magazine is the true first printing. Later the same year (1953), Teddy was incorporated into the collection Nine Stories. Harper’s magazine, in its review of Nine [...]
The Tax Inspector Peter Carey University of Queensland Press, Australia, 1991 This is the true first edition of Peter Carey’s fourth novel. The New York Times gave it a great review. Here is part of it: “Peter Carey writes beautiful sentences, worked on but not labored; his descriptive passages sweep us along and leave us [...]
Zooey J.D. Salinger, New Yorker Magazine, New York, May 4, 1957 Many people think that Zooey is Salinger’s finest work — certainly one of his finest. Salinger incorporates Zen Buddhism and Eastern religious philosophy all throughout this brilliant novella involving members of Salinger’s fictitious Glass family. This New Yorker magazine is the true first printing of [...]
Parrot and Olivier in America Peter Carey Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2009 Peter Carey has been living in New York since the early 1990′s, so you would think that the value of his recent American first editions would have moved closer to the value of the Australian firsts. But no. Signed U.S. firsts top [...]
2666 — ARC Roberto Bolano Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, New York, 2008 Any of you who are regular readers of my posts know that I have a slight (okay, maybe more than slight), obsession with the works of Roberto Bolano. They’ll also know that Bolano died tragically young after a long illness, and they might [...]
In the Heart of the Country J.M. Coetzee Ravan Press, South Africa, 1978 This South African novel, about the complex relationship between the colonizers and the colonized, reads like a fevered dream. Is it real, or are these the mad hallucinations of our isolated and lonely protagonist? This paperback original is the stated first South [...]
I Curse the River of Time Per Petterson Harvill Secker, London, 2010 Yet another stellar work of fiction by Norwegian author Per Petterson. I Curse the River of Time won the Nordic Council’s Literature Prize, the Brage Prize, and the Norwegian Critics Prize for Literature before it was translated into English. I’ll keep you up [...]