Wolff, Tobias:Our Story Begins: New and Selected Stories
- Paperback 2017, ISBN: 9781400044597
Hardcover
New York: Scribner; A Lisa Drew Book, 2004 273 pages, illustrations; 24 cm. Tight, clean copy. Light edgewear to boards & DJ. Another copy available. "A fascinating read of perso… More...
New York: Scribner; A Lisa Drew Book, 2004 273 pages, illustrations; 24 cm. Tight, clean copy. Light edgewear to boards & DJ. Another copy available. "A fascinating read of personal experiences from the famed fashion designer that showcases the lives and contributions of iconic women -- from Jackie Kennedy to Elizabeth Taylor to Laura Bush to Princess Diana. Arnold Scaasi has been dressing legends for almost five decades. His enduring tenure as one of the world's premier fashion designers and tastemakers has afforded him vast stores of insider knowledge and firsthand perspectives on an array of illustrious personalities who -- in their disparate arenas of high-wattage celebrity and influence -- have defined our contemporary notions of female power and glamour. Here, for the first time, Scaasi invites readers into his glittering A-list realm as he recounts his intimate experiences and interactions with larger-than-life female icons who made their mark in spheres as varied as politics, Hollywood, the music industry, and high society." - Publisher.. 1st. Hardcover. Very Good/Very Good. 8vo - over 7¾" - 9¾" tall., Scribner; A Lisa Drew Book, 2004, 3, New York: Tor Books, 1989. First edition. First mass market printing [stated]. Mass-market paperback. Good.. On the eve of WWII, four people struggle between love and honor. From an American Japanese to a samurai sworn to serve the Emperor to the woman they both love, this is a sweeping saga where mysticism must face science in the ultimate confrontation--from the author of The Keep. From Wikipedia: Francis Paul Wilson (b. May 17, 1946 in Jersey City, New Jersey) is an American author, primarily in the science fiction and horror genres. His debut novel was Healer (1976). Wilson is also a part-time practicing family physician. He made his first sales in 1970 to Analog while still in medical school (graduating in 1973), and continued to write science fiction throughout the seventies. In 1981, he ventured into the horror genre with the international bestseller, The Keep, and helped define the field throughout the rest of the decade. In the 1990s, he became a true genre hopper, moving from science fiction to horror to medical thrillers and branching into interactive scripting for Disney Interactive and other multimedia companies. He, along with Matthew J. Costello, created and scripted FTL Newsfeed, which ran daily on the Sci-Fi Channel from 1992-1996. Among Wilson's best-known characters is the anti-hero Repairman Jack, an urban mercenary introduced in the 1984 New York Times bestseller, The Tomb. Unwilling to start a series character at the time, Wilson refused to write a second Repairman Jack novel until Legacies in 1998. Since then he has written one per year along with side trips into vampire fiction (the retro Midnight Mass), science fiction (Sims), and even a New Age thriller (The Fifth Harmonic). Current books sales are around six million. Throughout his writing especially in his earlier science fiction works (most notably An Enemy of the State) Wilson has included explicitly libertarian political philosophy which extends to his "Repairman Jack" series. He won the first Prometheus Award in 1979 for his novel Wheels Within Wheels and another in 2004 for Sims. The Libertarian Futurist Society has also honored Wilson with their Hall of Fame Award for Healer (in 1990) and An Enemy of the State (in 1991). Like most American science fiction writers directly or indirectly influenced by Campbell's view of the genre as a literature of ideas, Wilson makes use of his work to explore trends and technologies speculatively as they manifest. A prominent example is his novel An Enemy of the State (published in 1980), which was written during the 1970s, an era that saw stagflation develop in the U.S. economy. In that period, inflation in the United States reached its highest level since World War II, due to the issue of fiat money by the Federal Reserve. In Wilson's novel, he extends the "squeeze" of confiscatory taxation and currency debauchment to a conclusion involving a Weimar Republic-style hyperinflation that brings down a galactic empire and from which humanity's only hope of rescue arrives in the form of an anarchist conspiracy to complete the Empire's downfall and replace that government's "official counterfeit" with honest money. Throughout the book, Wilson runs chapter headings quoting from economic works such as Fiat Money Inflation in Franceand KYFHO, a kind of anarchic philosophy that he invented as model for a perfect society. The protagonist La Nague was born on Tolive, where the philosophy led to a government described in detail in "The Healer". In January, 2012, Wilson began writing for the tech web site Byte, mostly in the persona of Repairman Jack. Wilson has been a resident of Wall Township, New Jersey.", Tor Books, 1989, 2.5, New York: Crown Publishers, 2015 294 pages, map; 25 cm. Tight, clean copy. Stated First Edition. Fine DJ. "A transporting, good-humored, and revealing account of Greece's dire troubles, reported from the mountain villages, idyllic islands, and hardscrabble streets that define the country today In recent years, small Greece, often associated with ancient philosophers and marble ruins, whitewashed villages and cerulean seas, has been at the center of a debt crisis that has sown economic and social ruin, spurred panic in international markets, and tested Europe's decades-old project of forging a closer union. In The Full Catastrophe, James Angelos makes sense of contrasting images of Greece, a nation both romanticized for its classical past and castigated for its dysfunctional present. With vivid character-driven narratives and engaging reporting that offers an immersive sense of place, he brings to life some of the causes of the country's financial collapse, and examines the changes, some hopeful and others deeply worrisome, emerging in its aftermath. A small rebellion against tax authorities breaks out on a normally serene Aegean island. A mayor from a bucolic, northern Greek village is gunned down by the municipal treasurer. An aging, leftist hero of the Second World War fights to win compensation from Germany for the wartime occupation. A once marginal group of neo-Nazis rises to political prominence out of a ramshackle Athens neighborhood. The Full Catastrophe goes beyond the transient coverage in the daily headlines to deliver an enduring and absorbing portrait of modern Greece." - Publisher.. 1st. Hardcover. Fine/Fine. 8vo - over 7¾" - 9¾" tall., Crown Publishers, 2015, 5, New York: Penguin Press, 2017 339 pages, 16 unnumbered pages of plates, illustrations; 25 cm. Tight, clean copy. Fine DJ. "From #1 New York Times bestselling author Thomas E. Ricks, a dual biography of Winston Churchill and George Orwell, with a focus on the pivotal years from the mid-1930s through the 1940s, when their farsighted vision and inspired action in the face of the threat of fascism and communism helped preserve democracy for the world. Both George Orwell and Winston Churchill came close to death in the mid-1930's--Orwell shot in the neck in a trench line in the Spanish Civil War, and Churchill struck by a car in New York City. If they'd died then, history would scarcely remember them. At the time, Churchill was a politician on the outs, his loyalty to his class and party suspect. Orwell was a mildly successful novelist, to put it generously. No one would have predicted that by the end of the 20th century they would be considered two of the most important people in British history for having the vision and courage to campaign tirelessly, in words and in deeds, against the totalitarian threat from both the left and the right. Together, to an extent not sufficiently appreciated, they kept the West's compass set toward freedom as its due north. It's not easy to recall now how lonely a position both men once occupied. By the late 1930's, democracy was discredited in many circles, and authoritarian rulers were everywhere in the ascent. There were some who decried the scourge of communism, but saw in Hitler and Mussolini 'men we could do business with,' if not in fact saviors. And there were others who saw the Nazi and fascist threat as malign, but tended to view communism as the path to salvation. Churchill and Orwell, on the other hand, had the foresight to see clearly that the issue was human freedom--that whatever its coloration, a government that denied its people basic freedoms was a totalitarian menace and had to be resisted. In the end, Churchill and Orwell proved their age's necessary men. The glorious climax of Churchill and Orwell is the work they both did in the decade of the 1940'sto triumph over freedom's enemies. And though Churchill played the larger role in the defeat of Hitler and the Axis, Orwell's reckoning with the menace of authoritarian rule in Animal Farm and 1984 would define the stakes of the Cold War for its 50-year course, and continues to give inspiration to fighters for freedom to this day. Taken together, in Thomas E. Ricks's masterful hands, their lives are a beautiful testament to the power of moral conviction, and to the courage it can take to stay true to it, through thick and thin." - Publisher.. Hardcover. Fine/Fine. 8vo - over 7¾" - 9¾" tall., Penguin Press, 2017, 5, New York: Alfred A. Knopf; A Borzoi Book, 2008 xii, 379 pages; 25 cm. Tight, clean copy. Stated First Edition. Fine DJ. "'One of our most exquisite storytellers' (Esquire) gives us his first collection in over a decade: ten potent new stories that, along with twenty-one classics, display his mastery over a quarter century. Tobias Wolff's first two books, In the Garden of the North American Martyrs and Back in the World, were a powerful demonstration of how the short story can 'provoke our amazed appreciation,' as The New York Times Book Review wrote then. In the years since, he's written a third collection, The Night in Question, as well as a pair of genre-defining memoirs (This Boy's Life and In Pharaoh's Army), the novella The Barracks Thief, and, most recently, a novel, Old School. Now he returns with fresh revelations--about biding one's time, or experiencing first love, or burying ones mother--that come to a variety of characters in circumstances at once everyday and extraordinary: a retired Marine enrolled in college while her son trains for Iraq, a lawyer taking a difficult deposition, an American in Rome indulging the Gypsy whos picked his pocket. In these stories, as with his earlier, much-anthologized work, he once again proves himself, according to the Los Angeles Times, 'a writer of the highest order: part storyteller, part philosopher, someone deeply engaged in asking hard questions that take a lifetime to resolve.' / Tobias Wolff is the author of seven previous books and the editor of The Vintage Book of American Short Stories. Among his honors are the PEN/Malamud Award and the Rea Award, both for excellence in the short story, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the PEN/Faulkner Award. He lives in Northern California and teaches at Stanford University." - Publisher.. 1st. Hardcover. Fine/Fine. 8vo - over 7¾" - 9¾" tall. Collectible., Alfred A. Knopf; A Borzoi Book, 2008, 5<