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The Best of Edward Abbey von Doug (Solist) Peacock

This is the only major collection of Abbey's writings compiled by the author himself: in his own words, "to present what I think is both the best and most representative of my writing—so far." It serves up a rich feast of fiction and prose by the singular American writer whom Larry McMurtry called "the Thoreau of the American West."

Devoted Abbey fans along with readers just discovering his work will find a mother lode of treasures here: generous chunks of his best novels, including The Brave Cowboy, Black Sun, and his classic The Monkey Wrench Gang; and more than a score of his evocative, passionate, trenchant essays—a genre in which he produced acknowledged masterpieces such as Desert Solitaire. Scattered throughout are the author's own petroglyph–style sketches.

This new edition adds selections from work that appeared shortly before Abbey's death: a chapter from Hayduke Lives!, the hilarious sequel to The Monkey Wrench Gang; excerpts from his revealing journals; and examples of his poetry. A new foreword by Doug Peacock—Abbey's close friend and the model for the flamboyant activist Hayduke—offers a fond appreciation of this larger–than–life figure in American letters.

CHF 26.15

Never Breathe a Word von Caroline Blackwood

Though perhaps better known for her tumultuous marriages to the painter Lucian Freud and poet Robert Lowell, Caroline Blackwood remains a woman whose formidable intellect and artistry indelibly marked every person she met and every sentence she crafted. When he interviewed her a year before her death in 1996, "The New York Times" chief art critic, Michael Kimmelman, called Blackwood a "strangely dramatic woman: intense and vulnerable, with . . . a dark, razor-sharp sense of humor and an offbeat sensibility."
The same can be said of the mostly female, and often troubled, characters in the stories of this startling new collection. Selections span the entirety of her career, from her first book, "For All That I Found There," to "Good Night Sweet Ladies," one of her last. The seven evocative nonfiction vignettes draw directly from Blackwood's fascinating life, from her early difficult years through her days as a quintessential bohemian. Three entirely unpublished stories are included in the collection.

CHF 29.60

Slavery Inc: The Untold Story of International Sex Trafficking von Lydia Cacho

Illegal, inhuman, and impervious to recession, there is one trade that continues to thrive, just out of sight. The international sex trade criss-crosses the entire globe, a sinister network made up of criminal masterminds, local handlers, corrupt policemen, willfully blind politicians, eager consumers, and countless hapless women and children. In this ground-breaking work of investigative reporting, the celebrated journalist Lydia Cacho follows the trail of the traffickers and their victims from Mexico to Turkey, Thailand to Iraq, Georgia to the UK, to expose the trade's hidden links with the tourist industry, internet pornography, drugs and arms smuggling, the selling of body organs, money laundering, and even terrorism.

This is an underground economy in which a sex slave can be bought for the price of a gun, but Cacho's powerful first-person interviews with mafiosi, pimps, prostitutes, and those who managed to escape from captivity makes it impossible to ignore the terrible human cost of this lucrative exchange.

Shocking and sobering, Slavery Inc, is an exceptional book, both for the colossal scope of its enquiry, and for the tenacious bravery with which Cacho pursues the truth.

CHF 26.50

That Distant Land: The Collected Stories von Wendell Berry

Originally published in 2005, That Distant Land brings together twenty–three stories from the Port William Membership. Arranged in their fictional chronology, the book is not an anthology so much as it is a coherent temporal mapping of this landscape over time, revealing Berry’s mastery of decades of the life lived alongside this clutch of interrelated characters bound by affection and followed over generations.

This volume combines the stories found in The Wild Birds (1985), Fidelity (1992), and Watch with Me (1994), together with a map and a charting of the complex and interlocking genealogies.

CHF 26.50

The Harold Letters von Clement Greenberg

Candid, breathless, arrogant, ambitious--here, in his own words, is Clement Greenberg, a young man of limitless intellectual appetite on his way to becoming the twentieth century's greatest art critic . Clement Greenberg was, and remains, America's most perceptive, prescient, and influential art critic. More alive than any of his contemporaries to the genius of art in his time, it was Greenberg who, in the 1940s and '50s, charted and celebrated the rise of Abstract Expressionism. The authority of his aesthetic judgment, and the force and clarity of his arguments, went far to establish those artists whose work he championed--Pollock, de Kooning, Hans Hofmann, David Smith.

Before all that, however, he was a young man burning to become an intellectual, to make what he called Important Discoveries about art and life. His confidant during these early years was Harold Lazarus, a classmate at Syracuse University and a future professor of English. From 1928, when both were nineteen, until 1943, when they went their separate ways, the two exchanged honest, funny, deeply personal letters, collected by his widow, Janice Van Horne.

CHF 29.60

Epitaph for a Tramp & Epitaph for a Dead Beat von David Markson

Before achieving critical acclaim as a novelist, David Markson paid the rent by writing several crime novels, including two featuring the private detective Harry Fannin. Together here in one volume, these works are now available to a new generation of readers.

In Epitaph for a Tramp, Fannin isn't called out to investigate a murder — it happens on his doorstop. In the sweltering heat of a New York August night, he answers the buzzer at his door to find his promiscuous ex–wife dying from a knife wound. To find her killer, Fannin plies his trade with classic hard–boiled aplomb. In the second novel, Epitaph for a Dead Beat, Fannin finds himself knee–deep in murder among the beatniks and bohemians of the early 1960s, where blood seems to flow as readily as cheap Chianti.

Intricately plotted and rife with wisecracks, David Markson offers suspenseful and literary crime novels.

CHF 24.90

East Into Upper East von Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

Hailed as one of the best books of 1998 by the Los Angeles Times, this group of twelve short stories was written over the past twenty years. From the steamy streets of New Delhi to New York's tony Upper East Side, Jhabvala's characters grapple with the universal quandaries of the human experience -- jealousy, passion, temptation, and deception -- truths of life and love that follow no matter where we wander.

CHF 26.70