Nu-ILB: What books have you purchased lately?

1st hand: Wolfgang Hilbig - Sleep of the Righteous

2nd hand - finding nothing forever till now (most of these are from this week)

Rilke - Letters 1910-1926
Osamu Dazai - The Setting Sun (really looking forward to this, wanted to read him for quite a while)
Harry Mathews - Singular Pleasures (so good to have my own copy of this)
Moravia - Two Adolescents (contains the old translation of Agostino, recently issued by NYRB)
Balzac - The Unknown Masterpiece

recent lapse of selfcontrol, passing through the city and getting drawn inexorably into the Strand:

1st hand:
Kathy Acker and Mackenzie Wark - I'm Very Into You: Correspondence 1995-96
Dodie Bellamy - When the Sick Rule the World

remainders:
Wayne Koestenbaum - My 1980s
Mary Gaitskill - Don't Cry

Love to read the Acker correspondence - sounds fascinating.

Went back and found more remainders:

Tanizaki - Some Prefer Nettles (and a couple of short stories in the Picador I picked up, read it before and I'll see how it stands up)
Denton Welch - In Youth is Pleasure (love Welch and I don't think I've read this)
Henrich von Kleist - The Prince of Homburg (looking forward to reading a play again, this by one of my favourite 19th century writers)

nd pearls reissue of nathalie sarraute, tropisms

Brecht - Short Stories

Quite a few half-price NYRB paperbacks @ Waterstones Gower St.

Robert Walser - A Schoolboy's Dairy
Vasily Grossman - An Armenian Sketch (read my library'copy so good to get my own)

Is "A Schoolboy's Diary" the same thing as has been published previously as "Instituta Benjamienta"?

javier marias: written lives
Gaito gazdanov: the flight
Bohumil hrabal: mr kafka

Googled and its a film based on Jakob von Grunten. Most on what's on A Schoolboy's Diary is appearing in English for the first time. xp

What's a film? Instituta Benjamienta? It was the name Serpents Tail used for one of the two Walsers in its Extraordinary Classics series (a series it never finished iirc) in (I'm guessing) the mid-90s.

(Used that name in response to the film coming out I imagine.)

Yes - I googled now with Serpent's Tail and see what you mean. Not sure is my answer. When I saw the intro think it said a lot of it was made available in English for the first time (a lot of his stuff hasn't been translated so it might more from a particular book).

I think… Institute Benjamenta is Christopher Middleton's 1969 translation of Jakob Von Gunten.

I guess retitled for the Quay Brothers' film? But I'd forgotten they were pretty close in date.

Woof is right, and as far as I can tell there's no overlap between Jakob von Gunten/Institute Benjaminta as a discrete novel and the short stories in A Schoolboy's Diary.

The Complete Short Stories by J.G.Ballard a large hardback book version which was €3 in a charity shop earlier.

Growing Food For Health and pleasure a 1971 book on organic gardening which was 25c
as was Miracle In the Andes the book on the Uruguyan rugby team plane crash in the Andes by one of the survivors. A story which has been filmed at least once. Should be interesting if i get around to it.

Plus Are Ye the Band a memoir of the showband era by Jimmy Higgins who was involved at the time. could be interesting. I've never really known that much about the scene.

Reminding me of the trad-associated American jazz listened to by the late 50s/early 60s hip kids in Colin MacInnes's City of Spades and Absolute Beginners. Although they also take in some bluebeat or whatever came before that when going to London's West Indian clubs and parties, I guess (MacInnes was an older white guy, and *seems* to have more of a sense of the specific jazz interests: Armstrong, Basie, etc.) I liked City... more than the subsequent books in that trilogy, but read 'em long ago.
Also dug the movie It's Trad, Dad, though seemed more like mad mods than trad per se, but what do I know.

Essay on a new collection of Walser's writing on art published today coincidentally enough.

After having so many tattered and partially overlapping Ballard paperback collections, the Complete Short Stories is one of my most prized books.

Yeah it looks really good. Hope I get a chance to read it through.
It's been a while since I read him. But I have enjoyed what I've read.

When I was rationalising my library I let go my beloved copy of Vermillion Sands because I had the complete stories. Still regret that.

Might get this---Sedaris covered some of the same territory, but much later (so did at least one other writer, I think):

http://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0119/8902/products/CUNY_web_size_1024x1024.jpg?v=1450292052

Dear Friend of the Little Bookroom,
This is the note—on the letterhead of a rare book dealer—that was tucked into the vintage copy of Cleaning Up New York that was sent to me, out of the blue:
“If ever a book merited moving from cult classic to classic, it is Cleaning Up New York by Bob Rosenthal. My wife worked for him in Allen Ginsberg’s office and we have been devoted readers ever since. Let me know what you think…”
From the first page, I was hooked by this chronicle of a 26-year-old starving poet who needed $60. He registers with a temp agency as a house cleaner and after his references check out—the poet Ron Padgett vouched that the author “always brushed his teeth”—he is catapulted into everyday yet unimaginable worlds behind closed (apartment) doors.
Bob knows one thing: Dirt will always win. Clients are a bit more unpredictable, he discovers, as he comes to terms with eccentric domestic habits and intimate dramas; weird vibes and even stranger discoveries; appreciation, dependency, dismissal…and seduction. When our hero becomes a weekly fixture in his clients’ lives, anything can happen, and does.
Along the way, he discovers that cleaning itself has its own allures and secrets, to which he devotes alternate chapters (what to wear, favorite products, how dust behaves, as well as the metaphysical nitty-gritty of physical labor).
Cleaning Up New York is a quirky reinvention in the tradition of George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London, Studs Terkel’s chronicles of the working class, and Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management, its narrator a kindred spirit to Candide, Ida Tarbell, and Holden Caulfield. It is also an incomparable portrait of the East Village in the Seventies. And, I promise, you’ll never look at a Hoover in the same way again.
(Sale price etc) For more information about the book please visit our website.
Angela Hederman
Editor, The Little Bookroom

more likely this, from the same source, and mostly for sake of pix (check out more on the Little Bookstore site)

http://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0119/8902/products/Brooklyn_A_Personal_Memoir_1024x1024.jpg?v=1443472977

Brooklyn: A Personal Memoir
With the lost photographs of David Attie
By Truman Capote
Introduction by George Plimpton
Afterword by Eli Attie
In 2001, Truman Capote’s stylish essay in praise of Brooklyn was brought back into print, but not until 2014—more than fifty years after they were taken—were the original photographs commissioned to illustrate the piece discovered by the late photographer’s son. Also found among the negatives were previously unknown portraits of Capote; none of the photos have ever been published. Now, in a new edition with a new title, Brooklyn: A Personal Memoir, the words and images are united for the first time.

Beloved by literary figures from Walt Whitman to Thomas Wolfe, Brooklyn cast its spell over Truman Capote, too. For a few tranquil years in the Fifties and Sixties, he happily made his home on Willow Street, where he wrote the legendary essay “Brooklyn Heights, A Personal Memoir.” In it, he vividly evokes the neighborhood he came to know well, bringing to life the landscape that was for him a world of grand homes and dimly recalled gentility, a garden overhung with wisteria, the famous Promenade, the sometimes menacing waterfront. This is his satisfying meander through a unique time and place.

David Attie’s images provide a stunning and atmospheric parallel portrait of Brooklyn in 1959—its buildings, shops, lost moments—a city at once strangely familiar yet largely vanished. Horse-drawn wagons deliver produce to housewives, kids swim unsupervised in the East River and get into mischief on the docks, and life plays out on stoops and streets against a backdrop of period architecture, the spectacular bridge, and the skyline of Manhattan.

"The long-lost photos...bring even more life to Capote’s sparkling description of the history and spirit of the neighborhood, with its eccentric characters, back alleys and fine houses ('as elegant and other-era as formal calling cards').” —The New York Times, “Travel"

ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Truman Capote (1924-1984), the novelist, journalist, and celebrated man-about-town, is best known as the author of Other Voices, Other Rooms, The Grass Harp, Breakfast at Tiffany's and In Cold Blood.

David Attie (1920-1982), a commercial and fine art photographer, began his photographic career as a student of influential Harper's Bazaar art director Alexey Brodovitch, who gave Attie his first professional assignment: to create a series of photo montages to illustrate Capote's “Breakfast at Tiffany's.” Attie’s work appeared in Vogue, Time, Newsweek, and Harper’s Bazaar, among other publications. He produced two books of photographs, Russian Self-Portraits, and (together with Chuck Close, Robert Mapplethorpe, and others) Portrait: Theory.

George Plimpton (1927-2003), the originator of "participatory journalism," was the editor of the Paris Review. His books include Paper Lion, Out of My League, The Bogey Man, Open Net, The Curious Case of Sidd Finch and The X Factor.

Eli Attie is a television writer and producer. He served as a special assistant to President Bill Clinton, and then as Vice President Al Gore's chief speechwriter. Attie was a longtime writer on the series The West Wing and House. He grew up in New York City, is a graduate of Hunter College High School and Harvard College, and lives in Los Angeles.

can't resist one more pic:

http://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0119/8902/products/Capote_School_Kids_1024x1024.jpg?v=1443472977
credit: David Attie

xps Vermilion Sands is great! I had a copy lent me by my last girlfriend, but I stupidly lent it to someone else and never got it back :(
Does the collected stories include the Atrocity Exhibition stuff or no?

computer says no.

these three are
Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan.
The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race.
Notes Towards a Mental Breakdown.

the rest aren't

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Atrocity_Exhibition
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Complete_Short_Stories_of_J._G._Ballard:_Volume_1
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Complete_Short_Stories_of_J._G._Ballard:_Volume_2

but all of Vermilion Sands is included.

A couple of 'what the heck, it's just a buck' purchases.

Lives of the Artists, Giorgio Vasari, used Penguin Classics paperback in standard condition, $1.

Selected Poems, W.H. Auden (who also made the selection), used paperback in standard condition, $1.

Ursula Le Guin- The Left Hand of Darkness
Haruki Murakami- The Wind Up Bird Chronicles
Muriel Spark - The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
David Bordwell and Kristen Thompson - Film Art

Was feeling gloomy so raided my local Oxfam.

Aldous Huxley - Along the Road: Notes and Essays of a Tourist started this, was hoping for Crome Yellow wit, and yes, the aesthete is definitely in evidence, but not in a particularly good way - the short essays are curiously hard going and mannered (perhaps not a surprise). Moments of humour and light though.
Flann O'Brian - The Hard Life
Christopher Hitchens - Hitch-22

flaubert - sentimental education

been really feeling like pleasure-shopping at physical bookstores lately, despite my finances, and the closest shop now is garrison keillor's, but the place is so irritatingly expensive now even on like cheap mass-market oxford world's classics, that the price almost makes me want to boycott out of spite

Charles Taylor - Sources of the Self
Amy Clampitt - Selected Poems
Pascal - Pensées

I just paid $1 (plus $10 shipping from the UK) for:

Gloria Anzaldua, Borderlands/La Frontera
Pauline Kael, State of the Art

we dont really care about theatre do we?

i bought all these for $1.50 each, some really cool stuff & most are in really great condition

http://i67.tinypic.com/2v3ipo6.jpg

seems like some may be worth a bit like marat/sade, pippin, the baldwin.. idk, i just thought they were cool. I'm sure some yale prof died for my bounty

Nice to score a remaindered copy of Ferrante's Days of Abandonment..

^ oooh! nice

I just came home with a paperback copy of a Farley Mowat book, The Farfarers. I know nothing about it except that Mowat is a generally reliable author who wrote readable, interesting books.

Those plays look like a nice haul!

found 4 boxes of religious philosophy (mostly but not exclusively jewish philosophy) sitting on the curb midway thru walking the dog. grabbed the best looking stuff but honestly left plenty of treasures behind. my score:

http://i.imgur.com/yrWh4GL.jpg

beautiful

Wow, worth grabbing some of those for the cover art alone

Bought the Bill Kreutzmann book Deal
and the NYC music Love Comes To a Building on Fire online last week. Haven't received them yet. Hoping my mail isn't being interfered with, expected things don't seem to be appearing.

It's Monday so will probably get something from a charity shop later.
Also really want to read 1971 by David Hepworth and that Heads book.

amy hempel - reasons to live
gary indiana - three month fever
gary indiana - horse crazy

jc's and mordy's hauls are amazing. envious.

Well Deal's just arrived so going to read that shortly.
Started reading Knut Hamsun's Hunger over the last few days after wanting to for decades.

acquired nice hardback copies of:

alan burns babel: a novel
marguerite duras the ravishing of lol stein

Cicero's Letters To His Friends, volumes 1 & 2, as used Penguin Classics for $0.50 each.

The Joys of Yiddish, Leo Rosten, as a used hardcover, $2. I owned a paperback of this about a decade ago, but sold it. Afterward, I rather missed it.

The Argumentative Indian, Amartya Sen, used trade paperback, $1. Essays.

I have been really enjoying "Mo' Meta Blues: The World According to Questlove".

A 1991 hardback of Magick by Aleister Crowley. A book I wanted to pick up 35 years ago.
Impulse buy but one that I'm glad I saw.

1st hand: August Strindberg - The Defence of a Madman

2nd hand:

Erich Heller - Kafka (this is study on Fontana Modern Masters)
Fernando Pessoa - Poems (on City lights)

I paid $1 for a nice used hardcover copy of New and Collected Poems 1917-1976, Archibald MacLeish, who is not my favorite poet by any means, but he probably wrote many decently readable poems and I'll troll around in this to find some of them.