James P Reynolds

Seymour: An Introduction J.D. Salinger New Yorker Magazine, June 6, 1955, New York This is the true first edition of Salinger’s stream of conscious narrative Seymour: An Introduction. This is one of Salinger’s Glass family stories in which Seymour’s brother, Buddy, tells the story of Seymour, who committed suicide eleven years earlier in the story [...]

Goodbye, Columbus Philip Roth Houghton Mifflin, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1959 Goodbye, Columbus is Philip Roth’s first work of fiction. It consists of the title work — a short novel — and five short stories. Roth was awarded a Literary Fellowship before this book was published, and it won the National Book Award in 1960. Many reviewers [...]

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 [...]

Lunar Caustic Malcolm Lowry Jonathan Cape, London, 1971 An unfinished masterpiece, Lunar Caustic was published posthumously as a novella. Lowry had meant to build it layer by meaningful layer into a novel, which was to be one of a sequence of seven novels that Lowry envisioned called The Voyage That Never Ends. Of course, Lowry [...]

Lunar Caustic Malcolm Lowry Cape Editions, London, 1968 Malcolm Lowry published only two novels during his lifetime: Ultramarine and Under the Volcano. He was in the process of weaving several inter-related stories and story fragments into a novel he meant to call Lunar Caustic when he ‘died by misadventure’ in 1957. Lowry’s widow Margerie and his [...]

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 [...]

A Silver Dish Saul Bellow New Yorker Magazine, New York, Sept 25, 1978 This New Yorker magazine is the true first printing of A Silver Dish, Bellow’s dense and intellectual novella; his first published story after winning the 1976 Nobel Prize. A luxurious signed limited edition of A Silver Dish was published one year later [...]

The Final Solution Michael Chabon Harper Collins, U.S.A. 2004 This novella came out one year earlier in a slightly different form in the Paris Review. In this story, Sherlock Holmes comes out of retirement to work on one last case. Reviews were mixed, but reviewers seem to be focused on comparing this book to Chabon’s [...]

Bad News Edward St. Aubyn Mandarin, London, 1994 Bad News is the first part of a trilogy by St. Aubyn. The three stories were originally published separately, and later the complete trilogy was published under the title The Patrick Melrose Trilogy. Later still, the U.S. edition of the trilogy was renamed Some Hope. It gets even more [...]

Antwerp Roberto Bolano New Directions, New York, 2010 Ignacio Echevarria, Bolano’s friend and literary executor, suggested that, “Antwerp can be viewed as the Big Bang of Bolano’s fictional universe: all the elements are here, highly compressed, at the moment his talent explodes.” It was translated into English by Natasha Wimmer, who also translated Bolano’s two [...]