William Lindsay Gresham's Books

Nightmare Alley

By: William Lindsay Gresham

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Soon to be a major motion picture from Academy Award–winning director Guillermo del Toro and starring Bradley Cooper, Cate Blanchett, Rooney Mara, and Toni Collette. Nightmare Alley begins with an extraordinary description of a carnival-show geek—alcoholic and abject and the object of the voyeuristic crowd’s gleeful disgust and derision—going about his work at a county fair. Young Stan Carlisle is working as a carny, and he wonders how a man could fall so low. There’s no way in hell, he vows, that anything like that will ever happen to him. And since Stan is clever and ambitious and not without a useful streak of ruthlessness, soon enough he’s going places. Onstage he plays the mentalist with a cute assistant (before long his harried wife), then he graduates to full-blown spiritualist, catering to the needs of the rich and gullible in their well-upholstered homes. It looks like the world is Stan’s for the taking. At least for now.

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304

Publisher

New York Review of Books

Published Date

ISBN 10

1590174283

ISBN 13

9781590174289

Nightmare Alley

The rediscovered American noir classic, now a major motion picture

By: William Lindsay Gresham

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Nightmare Alley

The rediscovered American noir classic, now a major motion picture

By: William Lindsay Gresham

OUT NOW IN CINEMAS AND NOMINATED FOR FOUR OSCARS A cool, cruel, rediscovered classic of American noir adapted for cinemas by Guillermo del Toro, starring Bradley Cooper, Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara 'Read and shudder. And relish' Guardian 'A creepy, all-too-harrowing masterpiece' Washington Post Stanton Carlisle, employed as a carny at a travelling circus watches their freak-show geek - an abject alcoholic, the object of the voyeuristic crowd's gleeful disgust and derision - and wonders how a man could fall so low. There's no way in hell, he vows, that anything like that will ever happen to him. Unlike the tragic figure he sees before him, Stan is young, clever and ambitious and quick to learn from the other carnival acts. Initially teaming up with a beautiful but vulnerable woman as part of a double act in which he mesmerises her, Stan soon leaves his circus days behind him, becoming a successful spiritualist who exploits the weak and the wealthy. But even the very best con-men can meet their match.... With a new introduction from James Smythe, Nightmare Alley is a forgotten classic of Depression-era America: a brilliant, horrifying, compulsive journey into the true darkness of the human mind.

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Page Count

400

Publisher

Bloomsbury Publishing

Published Date

ISBN 10

1526628481

ISBN 13

9781526628480

The Rim of Morning

Two Tales of Cosmic Horror

By: William Sloane

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The Rim of Morning

Two Tales of Cosmic Horror

By: William Sloane

In the 1930s, William Sloane wrote two brilliant novels that gave a whole new meaning to cosmic horror. In To Walk the Night, Bark Jones and his college buddy Jerry Lister, a science whiz, head back to their alma mater to visit a cherished professor of astronomy. They discover his body, consumed by fire, in his laboratory, and an uncannily beautiful young widow in his house—but nothing compares to the revelation that Jerry and Bark encounter in the deserts of Arizona at the end of the book. In The Edge of Running Water, Julian Blair, a brilliant electrophysicist, has retired to a small town in remotest Maine after the death of his wife. His latest experiments threaten to shake up the town, not to mention the universe itself.

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Page Count

481

Publisher

New York Review of Books

Published Date

ISBN 10

1590179072

ISBN 13

9781590179079

The Recognitions

By: William Gaddis

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The Recognitions

By: William Gaddis

A postmodern masterpiece about fraud and forgery by one of the most distinctive, accomplished novelists of the last century. The Recognitions is a sweeping depiction of a world in which everything that anyone recognizes as beautiful or true or good emerges as anything but: our world. The book is a masquerade, moving from New England to New York to Madrid, from the art world to the underworld, but it centers on the story of Wyatt Gwyon, the son of a New England minister, who forsakes religion to devote himself to painting, only to despair of his inspiration. In expiation, he will paint nothing but flawless copies of his revered old masters—copies, however, that find their way into the hands of a sinister financial wizard by the name of Recktall Brown, who of course sells them as the real thing. Dismissed uncomprehendingly by reviewers on publication in 1955 and ignored by the literary world for decades after, The Recognitions is now established as one of the great American novels, immensely ambitious and entirely unique, a book of wild, Boschian inspiration and outrageous comedy that is also profoundly serious and sad.

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Page Count

969

Publisher

New York Review of Books

Published Date

ISBN 10

1681374676

ISBN 13

9781681374673

The Stone Face

By: William Gardner Smith

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The Stone Face

By: William Gardner Smith

A roman à clef about racism, identity, and bohemian living amidst the tensions and violence of Algerian War-era France, and one of the earliest published accounts of the Paris massacre of 1961. As a teenager, Simeon Brown lost an eye in a racist attack, and this young African American journalist has lived in his native Philadelphia in a state of agonizing tension ever since. After a violent encounter with white sailors, Simeon makes up his mind to move to Paris, known as a safe haven for black artists and intellectuals, and before long he is under the spell of the City of Light, where he can do as he likes and go where he pleases without fear. Through Babe, another black American émigré, he makes new friends, and soon he has fallen in love with a Polish actress who is a concentration camp survivor. At the same time, however, Simeon begins to suspect that Paris is hardly the racial wonderland he imagined: The French government is struggling to suppress the revolution in Algeria, and Algerians are regularly stopped and searched, beaten, and arrested by the French police, while much worse is to come, it will turn out, in response to the protest march of October 1961. Through his friendship with Hossein, an Algerian radical, Simeon realizes that he can no longer remain a passive spectator to French injustice. He must decide where his true loyalties lie.

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Page Count

241

Publisher

New York Review of Books

Published Date

ISBN 10

1681375176

ISBN 13

9781681375175

Testing the Current

By: William McPherson

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Testing the Current

By: William McPherson

Growing up in a small upper Midwestern town in the late 1930s, young Tommy MacAllister is scarcely aware of the Depression, much less the rumblings of war in Europe. For his parents and their set, life seems to revolve around dinners and dancing at the country club, tennis dates and rounds of golf, holiday parties, summers on the Island, and sparkling occasions full of people and drinks and food and laughter. But curious as he is and impatient to grow up, Tommy will soon come to glimpse the darkness that lies beneath so much genteel complacency: hidden histories and embarrassing poor relations; the subtle (and not so subtle) slighting of the “help”; the mockery of President Roosevelt; and “the commandment they talked least about in Sunday school,” adultery. In Testing the Current William McPherson subtly sets off his wide-eyed protagonist’s perspective with mature reflection and wry humor and surrounds him with a cast of vibrant characters, creating a scrupulously observed portrait of a place and time that will shimmer in readers’ minds long after the final page is turned.

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Page Count

353

Publisher

New York Review of Books

Published Date

ISBN 10

1590176030

ISBN 13

9781590176030

The Letters of William Gaddis

Revised Edition

By: William Gaddis

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The Letters of William Gaddis

Revised Edition

By: William Gaddis

A revelatory collection of correspondence by the lauded author of titanic American classics such as The Recognitions and J R, shedding light on his staunchly private life. UPDATED WITH OVER TWO DOZEN NEW LETTERS AND PHOTOGRAPHS Now recognized as one of the giants of postwar American fiction, William Gaddis shunned the spotlight during his life, which makes this collection of his letters a revelation. Beginning in 1930 when Gaddis was at boarding school and ending in September 1998, a few months before his death, these letters function as a kind of autobiography, and also reveal the extent to which he drew upon events in his life for his fiction. Here we see him forging his first novel, The Recognitions (1955), while living in Mexico, fighting in a revolution in Costa Rica, and working in Spain, France, and North Africa. Over the next twenty years he struggles to find time to write the National Book Award–winning J R (1975) amid the complications of work and family; deals with divorce and disillusionment before reviving his career with Carpenter’s Gothic (1985); then teaches himself enough about the law to produce A Frolic of His Own (1994). Resuming his lifelong obsession with mechanization and the arts, he finishes a last novel, Agapē Agape (published in 2002), as he lies dying. This newly revised edition includes clarifying notes by Gaddis scholar Steven Moore, as well as an afterword by the author’s daughter, Sarah Gaddis.

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Page Count

705

Publisher

New York Review of Books

Published Date

ISBN 10

1681375842

ISBN 13

9781681375847

In the Heart of the Heart of the Country

And Other Stories

By: William H. Gass

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In the Heart of the Heart of the Country

And Other Stories

By: William H. Gass

First published in 1968, In the Heart of the Heart of the Country established William Gass as one of America’s finest and boldest writers of fiction, and nearly fifty years later, the book still stands as a landmark of contemporary fiction. The two novellas and three short stories it contains are all set in the Midwest, and together they offer a mythical reimagining of America’s heartland, with its punishing extremes of heat and cold, its endless spaces and claustrophobic households, its hidden and baffled desires, its lurking threat of violence. Exploring and expanding the limits of the short story, Gass works magic with words, words that are as squirming, regal, and unexpected as the roaches, boys, icicles, neighbors, and neuroses that fill these pages, words that shock, dazzle, illumine, and delight.

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274

Publisher

New York Review of Books

Published Date

ISBN 10

1590177649

ISBN 13

9781590177648

The Command to Look

A Master Photographer s Method for Controlling the Human Gaze

By: William Mortensen,George Dunham

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The Command to Look

A Master Photographer s Method for Controlling the Human Gaze

By: William Mortensen,George Dunham

The Command to Look was one of William Mortensen's most influential and sought-after books, and has been out of print for fifty years. Reproduced here in full, this book includes an essay by Michael Moynihan on how its images influenced the occult "lesser magic" of the founder of the Church of Satan, Anton Szandor LaVey. The book reproduces fifty-five images of Mortensen's best work and text by the wittiest and most biting writers on photography of their time.

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241

Publisher

Feral House

Published Date

ISBN 10

1627310053

ISBN 13

9781627310055

The Secret Life of Houdini

The Making of America's First Superhero

By: William Kalush,Larry Sloman

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The Secret Life of Houdini

The Making of America's First Superhero

By: William Kalush,Larry Sloman

In this groundbreaking book, renowned magic expert Kalush and bestselling writer Sloman team up to expose Harry Houdinis secret life as a spy, and the stunning plot to murder the magician and destroy his legacy. Photos throughout.

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Page Count

608

Publisher

Simon and Schuster

Published Date

ISBN 10

0743272080

ISBN 13

9780743272087

Nightmare Alley

By: William Lindsay Gresham

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Nightmare Alley

By: William Lindsay Gresham

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304

Publisher

New York Review of Books

Published Date

ISBN 10

1590174283

ISBN 13

9781590174289

J R

By: William Gaddis

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J R

By: William Gaddis

A National Book Award-winning satire about the unchecked power of American capitalism, written more than three decades before the 2008 financial crisis. At the center of J R is J R Vansant, a very average sixth grader from Long Island with torn sneakers, a runny nose, and a juvenile fascination with junk-mail get-rich-quick offers. Responding to one, he sees a small return; soon, he is running a paper empire out of a phone booth in the school hallway. Everyone from the school staff to the municipal government to the squabbling heirs of a player-piano company to the titans of Wall Street and the politicians in Washington will be caught up in the endlessly ballooning bubble of the J R Family of Companies. First published in 1975 and winner of the National Book Award in 1976, J R is an appallingly funny and all-too-prophetic depiction of America’s romance with finance. It is also a book about suburban development and urban decay, divorce proceedings and disputed wills, the crumbling facade of Western civilization and the impossible demands of love and art, with characters ranging from the earnest young composer Edward Bast to the berserk publicist Davidoff. Told almost entirely through dialogue, William Gaddis’s novel is both a literary tour de force and an unsurpassed reckoning with the way we live now.

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785

Publisher

New York Review of Books

Published Date

ISBN 10

1681374692

ISBN 13

9781681374697

Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue with His Century, Volume 2

The Man Who Learned Better (1948-1988)

By: William H. Patterson, Jr.

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Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue with His Century, Volume 2

The Man Who Learned Better (1948-1988)

By: William H. Patterson, Jr.

Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue with his Century: 1948-1988 The Man Who Learned Better: The real-life story of Robert A. Heinlein in the second volume of the authorized biography by William H. Patterson! Robert A. Heinlein (1907–1988) is generally considered the greatest American science fiction writer of the twentieth century. His most famous and widely influential works include the Future History series (stories and novels collected in The Past Through Tomorrow and continued in later novels), Starship Troopers, Stranger in a Strange Land, and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress—all published in the years covered by this volume. He was a friend of admirals, bestselling writers, and artists; became committed to defending the United States during the Cold War; and was on the advisory committee that helped Ronald Reagan create the Star Wars Strategic Defense Initiative in the 1980s. Heinlein was also devoted to space flight and humanity's future in space, and he was a commanding presence to all around him in his lifetime. Given his desire for privacy in the later decades of his life, the revelations in this biography make for riveting reading. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

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Page Count

672

Publisher

Macmillan

Published Date

ISBN 10

1429987960

ISBN 13

9781429987967

Book's by William Lindsay Gresham

Nightmare Alley

Nightmare Alley

Nightmare Alley

Nightmare Alley

The Rim of Morning

The Rim of Morning

The Recognitions

The Recognitions

The Stone Face

The Stone Face

Testing the Current

Testing the Current

The Letters of William Gaddis

The Letters of William Gaddis

In the Heart of the Heart of the Country

In the Heart of the Heart of the Country

The Command to Look

The Command to Look

The Secret Life of Houdini

The Secret Life of Houdini

Nightmare Alley

Nightmare Alley

J R

J R

Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue with His Century, Volume 2

Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue with His Century, Volume 2

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