James P Reynolds

The Corrections Jonathan Franzen Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, U.S.A. 2001 The Corrections won the 2001 National Book Award and the 2002 James Tait Black Memorial Prize. It was runner-up for the 2001 National Book Critics Circle Award, the 2002 Pulitzer Prize, the 2002 Pen/Faulkner Award, and the 2003 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. It was named one [...]

Value Versus Rarity People’s perception of what is valuable often has more impact on price than actual rarity. The dictionary definition of rare, in the case of collecting, is “not found in large numbers and, therefore, of interest and value.” In other words, the less of something, the more rare. So, it interests me no [...]

The Stranger’s Child Alan Hollinghurst Picador, U.K. 2011 This is another brilliant work of fiction by Hollinghurst, who won the Booker Prize for his previous novel The Line of Beauty. The Stranger’s Child is written in five novella length sections which focus  on the life and evolving history of a famous gay World War 1 poet. [...]

Never Mind Edward St. Aubyn Heinemann, U.K. 1992 There is virtually no information on the web about this edition of the debut novella by British author Edward St. Aubyn. Added to his later stories Bad News and Some Hope, the semi-autobiographical trilogy was later published under a couple of different titles. The best known version [...]

To Kill a Mockingbird Harper Lee J.B. Lippincott, U.S.A. 1960 This book is one of the gems of my collection. Although this is a first book club edition, it came out at the same time as the true first edition. The value of this copy is hard to assess. There are no signed or unsigned [...]

The Matter With Morris David Bergen HarperCollins, Canada, 2010 It takes a rare talent like Bergen’s to write a book about mourning and loss and still have it come across as optimistic. The Matter With Morris is Bergen’s sixth and, perhaps, his most accomplished novel to date. Steve Hayward says in his Globe and Mail [...]