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The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven
When it was first published in 1993, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven established Sherman Alexie as a stunning new talent of American letters. The basis for the award-winning movie Smoke Signals, it remains one of his most beloved and widely praised books. In this darkly comic collection, Alexie brilliantly weaves memory, fantasy, and stark realism to paint a complex, grimly ironic portrait of life in and around the Spokane Indian Reservation. These twenty-two interlinked tales are narrated by characters raised on humiliation and government-issue cheese, and yet are filled with passion and affection, myth and dream. Against a backdrop of alcohol, car accidents, laughter, and basketball, Alexie depicts the distances between Indians and whites, reservation Indians and urban Indians, men and women, and, most poetically, modern Indians and the traditions of the past. .
Price: $6.99
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Make Love the Bruce Campbell Way
What you're reading right now is known as the “flap copy.” This is where the 72,444 words of my latest book, Make Love the Bruce Campbell Way, are cooked down to fit in a 3 ½-by-9 ½-inch column. But how does one do that with a fictional story about a B movie actor’s disastrous attempt to finally star in a big-budget Hollywood movie? Do you tantalize readers with snappy zingers like the one in chapter six where Biff the Wonder Boy says, “You may be bred in ol’ Kentucky, but you're only a crumb up here”? Or do you reveal pivotal plot points like the one at the end of the book where the little girl on crutches points an accusing finger and shouts, “The killer is Mr. Potter!” I have too much respect for you as an attention-deficient consumer to attempt such an obvious ruse. But let’s not play games here. You’ve already picked up the book, so you either: A. Know who I am B. Like the cool smoking jacket I’m wearing on the cover C. Have just discovered that the bookstore restroom is out of toilet paper Is this a relationship book? Well, if by “relationship book” you mean that the characters in it have relationships or are related to someone, then yes, absolutely. Will you learn how to pick up chicks? Good heavens, I can only hope so, though for best results in that department you should both read this book and be Brad Pitt. Is it a sequel to my autobiography, If Chins Could Kill: Confessions of a B Movie Actor? Sadly, no, which made it much harder to write. According to my publisher, I haven't “done” enough since 2001 to warrant another memoir. Is it an “autobiographical novel”? Yes. I'm the lead character in the story and I'm a real person and everything in the book actually happened, except for all the stuff that didn’t. Mostly, the action revolves around my preparations for a pivotal role in director Mike Nichols’s A-list relationship film Let's Make Love!, starring Richard Gere, Renée Zellweger, and Christopher Plummer. This is the kind of break most actors can only dream of. But my Homeric attempt to break through the glass ceiling of B-grade genre fare is hampered by a vengeful studio executive and a production that becomes infected by something called the “B movie virus,” symptoms of which include excessive use of cheesy special effects, slapstick, and projectile vomiting. When someone fingers me as the guy responsible for the virus, thus ruining my good standing in the entertainment industry (hey, I said it was fiction, okay?), I become a fugitive racing against the clock, an innocent patsy battling the shadowy forces of the studio system to clear my name, save my career, and destroy the Death Star. In a jaw-dropping twist worthy of Hitchcock (page 274), you'll gasp as I turn the tables on Hollywood and attempt to salvage my reputation in a town where you’re only as good as your last remake. From a violent fistfight with a Buddhist to a life-altering stint in federal prison, this novel has it all. If you like John Grisham, Tom Clancy, or one too many run-on sentences, you'll absolutely love Make Love the Bruce Campbell Way. And if the 72,444 words are too time-consuming, there are lots and lots of cool graphics. Regards, Bruce “Don't Call Me Ash” Campbell ~ Bruce Campbell's first book, If Chins Could Kill, was a major sleeper hit and became a New York Times and national bestseller. His immense energy and sharp wit are in evidence again in Make Love the Bruce Campbell Way, a novel that will have readers laughing out loud. .
Price: $4.99
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A Christmas Story: The Book That Inspired the Hilarious Classic Film
A beloved, bestselling classic of humorous and nostalgic Americana—the book that inspired the equally classic Yuletide film.
The holiday film A Christmas Story, first released in 1983, has become a bona fide Christmas perennial, gaining in stature and fame with each succeeding year. Its affectionate, wacky, and wryly realistic portrayal of an American family’s typical Christmas joys and travails in small-town Depression-era Indiana has entered our imagination and our hearts with a force equal to It’s a Wonderful Life and Miracle on 34th Street. This edition of A Christmas Story gathers together in one hilarious volume the gems of autobiographical humor that Jean Shepherd drew upon to create this enduring film. Here is young Ralphie Parker’s shocking discovery that his decoder ring is really a device to promote Ovaltine; his mother and father’s pitched battle over the fate of a lascivious leg lamp; the unleashed and unnerving savagery of Ralphie’s duel in the show with the odious bullies Scut Farkas and Grover Dill; and, most crucially, Ralphie’s unstoppable campaign to get Santa—or anyone else—to give him a Red Ryder carbine action 200-shot range model air rifle. Who cares that the whole adult world is telling him, “You’ll shoot your eye out, kid”? The pieces that comprise A Christmas Story, previously published in the larger collections In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash and Wanda Hickey’s Night of Golden Memories, coalesce in a magical fashion to become an irresistible piece of Americana, quite the equal of the film in its ability to warm the heart and tickle the funny bone..
Price: $5.70
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A Dance to the Music of Time: First Movement (Dance to the Music of Time)
Anthony Powell's universally acclaimed epic encompasses a four-volume panorama of twentieth century London. Hailed by Time as "brilliant literary comedy as well as a brilliant sketch of the times," A Dance to the Music of Time opens just after World War I. Amid the fever of the 1920s and the first chill of the 1930s, Nick Jenkins and his friends confront sex, society, business, and art. In the second volume they move to London in a whirl of marriage and adulteries, fashions and frivolities, personal triumphs and failures. These books "provide an unsurpassed picture, at once gay and melancholy, of social and artistic life in Britain between the wars" (Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.). The third volume follows Nick into army life and evokes London during the blitz. In the climactic final volume, England has won the war and must now count the losses. Four very different young men on the threshold of manhood dominate this opening volume of A Dance to the Music of Time. The narrator, Jenkins—a budding writer—shares a room with Templer, already a passionate womanizer, and Stringham, aristocratic and reckless. Widermerpool, as hopelessly awkward as he is intensely ambitious, lurks on the periphery of their world. Amid the fever of the 1920s and the first chill of the 1930s, these four gain their initiations into sex, society, business, and art. Considered a masterpiece of modern fiction, Powell's epic creates a rich panorama of life in England between the wars. Includes these novels: A Question of UpbringingA Buyer's Market The Acceptance World"Anthony Powell is the best living English novelist by far. His admirers are addicts, let us face it, held in thrall by a magician."— Chicago Tribune"A book which creates a world and explores it in depth, which ponders changing relationships and values, which creates brilliantly living and diverse characters and then watches them grow and change in their milieu. . . . Powell's world is as large and as complex as Proust's."—Elizabeth Janeway, New York Times"One of the most important works of fiction since the Second World War. . . . The novel looked, as it began, something like a comedy of manners; then, for a while, like a tragedy of manners; now like a vastly entertaining, deeply melancholy, yet somehow courageous statement about human experience."—Naomi Bliven, New Yorker.
Price: $13.00
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On the Road: 50th Anniversary Edition
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In Our Time
THIS COLLECTION OF SHORT STORIES AND VIGNETTES MARKED ERNEST HEMINGWAY'S AMERICAN DEBUT AND MADE HIM FAMOUSWhen In Our Time was published in 1925, it was praised by Ford Madox Ford, John Dos Passos, and F. Scott Fitzgerald for its simple and precise use of language to convey a wide range of complex emotions, and it earned Hemingway a place beside Sherwood Anderson and Gertrude Stein among the most promising American writers of that period. In Our Time contains several early Hemingway classics, including the famous Nick Adams stories "Indian Camp," "The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife," "The Three Day Blow," and "The Battler," and introduces readers to the hallmarks of the Hemingway style: a lean, tough prose -- enlivened by an car for the colloquial and an eye for the realistic that suggests, through the simplest of statements, a sense of moral value and a clarity of heart. Now recognized as one of the most original short story collections in twentieth-century literature, In Our Time provides a key to Hemingway's later works..
Price: $3.45
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Junky: The Definitive Text of Junk (50th Anniversary Edition)
Before his 1959 breakthrough, Naked Lunch, an unknown William S. Burroughs wrote Junk, his first book, a candid, eyewitness account of times and places that are now long gone. This book brings them vividly to life again; it is an unvarnished field report from the American postwar underground. For this definitive 50th-anniversary edition, eminent Burroughs scholar Oliver Harris has painstakingly re-created the author's original text, word by word, from archival typescripts. Here for the first time are Burroughs's own unpublished Introduction and an entire omitted chapter, along with many "lost" passages and auxiliary texts by Allen Ginsberg and others. Harris's comprehensive Introduction reveals the composition history of Junk's text and places its contents against a lively historical background..
Price: $7.11
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What Is Life?: with "Mind and Matter" and "Autobiographical Sketches"
Nobel laureate Erwin Schrödinger's What is Life? is one of the great science classics of the twentieth century. A distinguished physicist's exploration of the question which lies at the heart of biology, it was written for the layman, but proved one of the spurs to the birth of molecular biology and the subsequent discovery of the structure of DNA. The philosopher Karl Popper hailed it as a 'beautiful and important book' by 'a great man to whom I owe a personal debt for many exciting discussions'. It appears here together with Mind and Matter, his essay investigating a relationship which has eluded and puzzled philosophers since the earliest times. Schrodinger asks what place consciousness occupies in the evolution of life, and what part the state of development of the human mind plays in moral questions. Brought together with these two classics are Schrödinger's autobiographical sketches, published and translated here for the first time. They offer a fascinating fragmentary account of his life as a background to his scientific writings, making this volume a valuable additon to the shelves of scientist and layman alike..
Price: $7.50
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