Library

Price: $12.99

ISBN: 9780785814535

Summary: This collection of 73 short stories and 48 poems includes such masterpieces as The Fall of the House of Usher, The Purloined Letter, The Tell-Tale Heart, The Raven, and Murders in the Rue Morgue.

Price: $17.95

ISBN: 9780399504334

Summary: The title of this deliciously creepy collection of Gorey's work stems from the word "amphigory", meaning a nonsense verse or composition. As always, Gorey's painstakingly cross- hatched pen and ink drawings are perfectly suited to his oddball verse and prose. The first book of 15, "The Unstrung Harp," describes the writing process of novelist Mr. Clavius Frederick Earbrass: "He must be mad to go on enduring the unexquisite agony of writing when it all turns out drivel." In "The Listing Attic," you'll find a set of quirky limericks such as "A certain young man, it was noted, / Went about in the heat thickly coated; / He said, 'You may scoff, / But I shan't take it off; / Underneath I am horribly bloated.' "
Many of Gorey's tales involve untimely deaths and dreadful mishaps, but much like tragic Irish ballads with their perky rhythms and melodies, they come off as strangely lighthearted. "The Gashlycrumb Tinies," for example, begins like this: "A is for AMY who fell down the stairs, B is for BASIL assaulted by bears," and so on. An eccentric, funny book for either the uninitiated or diehard Gorey fans.

Price: $22.00

Edition: Reprint

ISBN: 0156030217

Summary: This latest collection displays in glorious abundance the offbeat characters and droll humor of Edward Gorey. Figbash is acrobatic, topiaries are tragic, hippopotami are admonitory, and galoshes are remorseful in this celebration of a unique talent that never fails to delight, amuse, and confound readers. Amphigorey Again contains previously uncollected work and two unpublished stories—"The Izzard Book," a quirky riff on the letter Z, and "La Malle Saignante," a bilingual homage to early French silent serial movies. Rough sketches and unfinished panels show an ironic and singular mind at work.

Price: $22.00

ISBN: 9780156056724

Summary: Drawings (including thirty-two pages in color), captions, and verse showcasing Gorey’s unique talents and humor. “The Glorious Nosebleed,” “The Utter Zoo,” “The Epiplectic Bicycle,” and fourteen other selections.

Price: $17.95

ISBN: 9780399504204

Summary: This second mass-market anthology of Gorey's assorted works holds its own against the first collection, Amphigorey, and presents pieces previously found in a number of his once hard to locate, highly-sought shorter books. This volume concentrates on the more obscure among Edward Gorey's output, and in fact several of the tales here I had never heard of before I acquired Amphigorey Too. The irony in the fact so many of these illustrated tales are humorous (in addition to being ironic, strange and disturbing) is that Gorey balanced their intentional comic value with the concept that he was not trying to provide his readers with unalterated amusement. In fact an editor once challenged Gorey by saying, "Edward, this isn't funny." To which Gorey replied, "Sir, isn't it best that it not be?" Amphigorey Too is a wonderful compiliation and a must-have for any Gorey fan.

Price: $25.95

ISBN:

Summary: If your pulse flutters at the thought of castle ruins and descents into crypts by moonlight, you will savor every creepy page of Elizabeth Kostova's long but beautifully structured thriller "The Historian". The story opens in Amsterdam in 1972, when a teenage girl discovers a medieval book and a cache of yellowed letters in her diplomat father's library. The pages of the book are empty except for a woodcut of a dragon. The letters are addressed to: "My dear and unfortunate successor." When the girl confronts her father, he reluctantly confesses an unsettling story: his involvement, twenty years earlier, in a search for his graduate school mentor, who disappeared from his office only moments after confiding to Paul his certainty that Dracula--Vlad the Impaler, an inventively cruel ruler of Wallachia in the mid-15th century--was still alive. The story turns out to concern our narrator directly because Paul's collaborator in the search was a fellow student named Helen Rossi (the unacknowledged daughter of his mentor) and our narrator's long-dead mother, about whom she knows almost nothing. And then her father, leaving just a note, disappears also.
As well as numerous settings, both in and out of the East Bloc, Kostova has three basic story lines to keep straight--one from 1930, when Professor Bartolomew Rossi begins his dangerous research into Dracula, one from 1950, when Professor Rossi's student Paul takes up the scent, and the main narrative from 1972. The criss-crossing story lines mirror the political advances, retreats, triumphs, and losses that shaped Dracula's beleaguered homeland--sometimes with the Byzantines on top, sometimes the Ottomans, sometimes the rag-tag local tribes, or the Orthodox church, and sometimes a fresh conqueror like the Soviet Union.
Although the book is appropriately suspenseful and a delight to read--even the minor characters are distinctive and vividly seen--its most powerful moments are those that describe real horrors. Our narrator recalls that after reading descriptions of Vlad burning young boys or impaling "a large family," she tried to forget the words: "For all his attention to my historical education, my father had neglected to tell me this: history's terrible moments were real. I understand now, decades later, that he could never have told me. Only history itself can convince you of such a truth." The reader, although given a satisfying ending, gets a strong enough dose of European history to temper the usual comforts of the closing words. "--Regina Marler"

Price: $15.00

Edition: 2

ISBN: 1573225126

Summary: Elizabeth Wurtzel writes with her finger in the faint pulse of a generation whose ruling icons are Kurt Cobain, Xanax, and pierced tongues. A memoir of her bouts with depression and skirmishes with drugs, Prozac Nation still manages to be a witty and sharp account of the psychopharmacology of an era.

Price: $9.99

Edition: Reprint

ISBN: 1416903550

Summary: Raised in a religious -- yet abusive -- family, Pattyn Von Stratten starts asking questions -- about God, a woman's role, sex, love. She experiences the first stirrings of passion, but when her father catches her in a compromising position, events spiral out of control. Pattyn is sent to live with an aunt in the wilds of Nevada to find salvation and redemption. What she finds instead is love and acceptance -- until she realizes that her old demons will not let her go.