Search Results: Authors starting with M from Ed Smith Books

Bowling Green: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1972. First edition. Paperback. A very good clean copy with wear to extremities. John Cawelti was one of the pioneers in establishing an academic respectability to the study of popular culture. As an example, he published "The Six Gun Mystique" which was based on an analysis of the messages contained in the western novels which were very popular for many decades with the public. This copy is warmly inscribed to Ross Macdonald by the author on the title page. With a full-page note in pencil by Ross Macdonald on the front endpaper expanding on a sentence on page 33 regarding "collective dreams." "There are certain dreams from which we wake refreshed," writes Macdonald. ("Perhaps I am having one now--I hope this isn't a dream). The kind of dreams that refuel us giving the sense of having communed with ourselves, I believe, as if we had overheard ourselves talking in our sleep. This is one of my ideas of popular art, where a nation stirs in its… Read More

Universal City: Universal Studios, 1991. First edition. Paperback. A near fine copy. The press kit for the film remake (of the 1962 classic) based on a novel by John D. MacDonald and that was directed by Martin Scorsese and stars Robert De Niro Nick Nolte, Jessica Lange, Joe Don Baker, and Juliet Lewis. Also, several actors from the 1962 original have cameo roles in this film (Robert Mitchum, Grogory Peck and Martin Balsam). The film was released on November 13, 1991. The press kit, housed in the original studio folder with photo illustration includes: 13 black and white film stills with captions, 24-pages of production notes, 7 pages of credits, and 5 bios which includes; Martin Scorsese (5pp), Robert De Niro (3pp), Nick Nolte (4pp), Juliette Lewis (3pp) and Jessica Lange (3pp). A convicted rapist, released from prison after serving a 14-year sentence, stalks the family of the lawyer who originally defended him.

New York: The Dial Press, 1940. First edition. Hardcover. Very good to very good plus copy in green cloth with dark red lettering.. Lacking the dust jacket. The author's solo collection and Queen's Quorum title #95. A large group (33 stories) of police procedural tales, each around four to eight pages long. O'Malley is a New York cop; in each tale he solves a mystery, usually a murder. Uncommon title.

London: Orbit, 2004. First edition. Hardcover. A nearly fine copy in a near fine dust jacket. A stand-alone space opera, charting the struggle for human survival in a universe dominated by post-human intelligence. 369 pages.

New York: Crown, 2012. First edition. Hardcover. A fine copy in a fine dust jacket. This copy is signed by Rachel Maddow on the title page. Here, Maddow brings her passion, wit, cool common sense, and intellectual firepower to the epic and darkly farcical story of how America has declined into an overfunded and unchecked national security state, one that inflicts more damage on America's assets, our military included, than it does on our adversaries. 275 pages with index.

San Antonio: Trinity University Press, 2012. First edition. Hardcover. A near fine copy in red cloth and photo illustrated boards, issued without dust jacket. Miguel Gandert. Inscribed by the author on the front endpaper. Arturo Madrid's homeland is in the shadow of the Rocky Mountains in northern New Mexico, where each town seems a world apart from the next, and where family histories that extend back four centuries bind the people to the land and to one another.This New Mexico is a land of struggle and dispute, a place in which Madrid's ancestors predate those who landed at Plymouth Rock. In the Country of Empty Crosses is Madrid's complex yet affirming memoir about lands before the advent of passable roads--places such as Tierra Amarilla, San Augustín [insert "u" and note accent on I], and Los Fuertes that were once among the most remote in the nation. Madrid grew up in a family that was doubly removed from the community: as Hispanic Protestants, they were a minority among the region's… Read More

New York: Random House, 1984. Uncorrected Proof. Paperback. A near fine copy in perfect bound yellow printed wrappers as issued (spine slightly dulled). Norman Mailer peers into the recesses and buried virtues of the modern American male in a brilliant crime novel that transcends genre. When Tim Madden, an unsuccessful writer living on Cape Cod, awakes with a gruesome hangover, a painful tattoo on his upper arm, and a severed female head in his marijuana stash, he has almost no memory of the night before. As he reconstructs the missing hours, Madden runs afoul of retired prizefighters, sex addicts, mediums, former cons, a world-weary ex-girlfriend, and his own father, old now but still a Herculean figure. Stunningly conceived and vividly composed, Tough Guys Don't Dance represents Mailer at the peak of his powers. Basis for the big screen film directed by Mailer that starred Ryan O'Neal and Isabella Rossellini.

Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1988. First edition thus. Hardcover. A near fine copy in a near fine dust jacket. The Zuni folksinger Painted Turtle first made her appearance in Clarence Major's award-winning and critically acclaimed novel, My Amputations (1986). In this simply told new work, Painted Turtle is at the center of a lyrical tale narrated by Baldy, a Navajo guitar player. She tells of her struggles, from her childhood experiences living on the Zuni reservation to the time of her performances on the grimy cantina circuit throughout the American Southwest. Baldy's story is a quiet love story, a tale of wonderment. But it is also a tale of a quest for self-realization, the quest of an unwed mother of twin boys who finds herself an outsider and the cause of conflict among her family, her clan, her tribe. Against all odds, Painted Turtle struggles desperately to keep her integrity while remaining in touch with the deep rhythms of her heritage. And through her music seeks a cure for the… Read More

New York: Farrar , Straus and Giroux, 1982. Uncorrected Proof. Paperback. A near fine copy bound in the original green perfect bound printed wrappers with black lettering. Malamud's last novel is a modern-day dystopian fantasy, set in a time after a thermonuclear war prompts a second flood -- a radical departure from Malamud's previous fiction. The novel's protagonist is paleolosist Calvin Cohn, who had been attending to his work at the bottom of the ocean when the Devastation struck, and who alone survived. This rabbi's son -- a "marginal error" -- finds himself shipwrecked with an experimental chimpanzee capable of speech, to whom he gives the name Buz. Soon other creatures appear on their island-baboons, chimps, five apes, and a lone gorilla. Cohn works hard to make it possible for God to love His creation again, and his hopes increase as he encounters the unknown and the unforeseen in this strange new world. With God's Grace, Malamud took a great risk, and it paid off. The novel's fresh and… Read More

New York: FSG, 1961. First edition. Paperback. Tiny vertical folds at foredge on a few pages, otherwise the book (the signatures) are very good plus, the jacket is very good with chipping at the spine crown affecting the B and E of the author's name. The signatures of the book laid into a dust jacket (advance copy?). The author's third published novel, a semi-autobiographical campus novel that is set in the Pacific Northwest. 367 pages.

San Francisco: Black Stone Press, 1982. First edition. Hardcover. A fine copy.. Meje Malles. Small Folio. A collection of art and poetry by Malle Meje (wife of Jorma Kaukonen). #186 of 200 numbered copies signed by Meje. Illustrations throughout. Hardbound with black cloth spine and red illustrated boards.

New York: George Braziller, 1982. First edition. Hardcover. A fine copy in brown cloth with white spine stamping and front cover illustration, in a nearly fine dust jacket. Told entirely in the first person, Child's Play is an account of a contemporary Italian terrorist, whose assignment it is to assassinate a distinguished and ageing author.The Bread of Time to Come concerns a young man growing up in Australia before WWI. His keen interest in birds and nature enables him to find a job as a gamekeeper of an estate. Finding himself in the trenches in France, his Eden-like world is shattered. 282 pages.

New York: Arbor House. First edition. Paperback. A very good plus copy in perfect bound illustrated wrappers, as issued. Advance copy of this novel set in south Florida, amid the steaming everglades and the power-grabbing energies of a time that saw swamp and shantytowns bull-dozed into prosperous developments and superhighways, as wily men became tyrannical and rich. Three characters dominate the book: Tate Fenneran imperious manipulator of lives for his own ends and what he believes is the greater good; Majosee, a Seminole girl whose brutal violation by five youths starts the current of crocodile blood that surges through these pages; and Gave Kogen, artist and outlander come to live in Fenneran's halcyon community,, and to tell us of a past and a present in which monstrous abuses incite a deadly new morality in a people in whom the real and the super-natural so marry that neither Gabe nor we can know with certainty which is which. Confronted in these pages with the grotesque face of retribution,… Read More

New York: St. Martin's Press, 2016. First edition. A fine copy in a fine dust jacket. Frank Mankiewicz was a man who wore many hats in his illustrious career. On the front of the dust jacket lists four events; Growing Up in Beverly Hills, Serving in WWII, Working with Robert Kennedy, and Traveling with Hunter S Thompson. Those events turned him into one of the twentieth century's most gifted raconteurs. 267 pages. Illustrated from photographs.

New York: Random House, 1991. First edition. Paperback. A near fine copy. Advance uncorrected proof. A darkly comic tale of drugs, organized crime, a missing person, and a Nebraska priest's quest for meaning in a topless bar. 256 pages. Perfect bound in the original decorated slick wrappers.

Boston: Bulfich Press/Little Brown & Co, 1990. First edition. Hardcover. A near fine copy in a near fine, clean dust jacket. 4to. 50 color illustrations. A breathtaking collection of flower photographs by Mapplethorpe. All in color, some of his final work. Though his best known flower images were in black and white, this book reveals his genius in color. The photographs here range from images of the early 1980s to many taken in the months before his death. The latter, in particular, are astounding in their intensity; here one finds both erotic drama and absolute clarity of composition, Mapplethorpe's gift at its most bold and uncompromising.

New York: Public Affairs, 2010. First edition. hardcover. A near fine copy in a near fine dust jacket. The wild turbulence of his music mirroring the swings in his popular acclaim, makes Van Morrison one of the most perplexing and mysterious figures in modern music. He willfully resists simple categorization: he is as much a bluesman as a Celtic soul singer, a rock-and-roller as a folk singer, a diva as a balladeer. His greatest songs are at one moment his own, at another his versions of those by others. The author takes us through the extraordinary and unclassifiable moments in Morrison's career, beginning in 1965 and continuing in full force to this day. It provides a journey between the transcendent and the wretched years of Morrison's work as utterly forgettable. The book travels between the high points and sublime dislocations in which the singer reaches an extreme musical threshold, and it leaps the chasms as it tracks perhaps the most enigmatic and revelatory performer of our time.

Verona: Edizioni Valdonega, 1980. One of 1500. Hardcover. A fine copy in cloth with spine label in red and gold stamping with the original cardboard slipcase. 4to. Mardersteig, 1892-1977, moved to Switzerland in 1922, founded a hand press, the Officina Bodoni, and began producing books. In 1927 he moved his press to Verona, Italy, partly in order to print a state-funded edition of the complete works of Gabriele D'Annunzio, which was completed in 1936. Mardersteig quickly developed a reputation for very fine typographical work, and for his scholarly approach to book design and production. He printed with a Dingler hand press on hand or mould-made papers or vellum and often had his books bound in quarter vellum or leather with a decorated paper on the boards, in the tradition of European private presses. Mardersteig was responsible for designing several typefaces for use at the press; Dante, Griffo and Zeno among them. All based on Humanist types of the early years of European printing. The punches… Read More

New York: Aperture, 1999. First edition. Hardcover. A near fine clean copy in a near fine dust jacket. Mary Ellen Mark. The unspoken poetry of our nation revealed by an American master. The first collection of the extensive and superlative work realized by Mary Ellen Mark in the United States, Mary Ellen Mark is composed of many previously unpublished images, as well as photographs from several of her best-known projects. From "Streetwise" to "The Damm Family," Mary Ellen Mark includes the most iconic images from these groundbreaking stories, as well as powerful, never-before-seen photographs Mark accomplished in subsequent years. She makes a deeply felt commitment to her subjects, and her empathy and humanity come through in every image. Mark is unsurpassed at shaping not only the odd but the everyday into genuinely surprising visual icons. With an eye for symbolism and a gift for meticulous composition, she is drawn to a variety of spectacles and situations, and demonstrates a particular affinity… Read More

New York/London: Hogarth, 2022. First edition. Hardcover. A fine copy in a fine dust jacket. Signed by the author on a tipped in sheet (after the first blank). Like many before her, Maria Lagana has come to Hollywood to outrun her past. Born in Rome, where every Sunday her father took her to the cinema instead of church, Maria immigrates with her mother to Los Angeles after a childhood transgression leads to her father's arrest. Fifteen years later, on the eve of America's entry into World War II, Maria is an associate producer at Mercury Pictures, trying to keep her personal and professional lives from falling apart. Her mother won't speak to her. Her boss, a man of many toupees, has been summoned to Washington by congressional investigators. Her boyfriend, a virtuoso Chinese American actor, can't escape the studio's narrow typecasting. And the studio itself, Maria's only home in exile, teeters on the verge of bankruptcy. Over the coming months, as the bright lights go dark across Los Angeles,… Read More