Bargain Books

Since I'm getting over the writing thing, I'm reading a lot more. But I can't stand paying retail for a book, except as a last resort. Even books by people I know (though I would be glad to give the author five bucks or whatever royalty might be approriate). But there are thousands, maybe millions, of good books out there, looking for readers like me, who paid $3.95 for Samuel Beckett's Three Novels forty years ago, and see no sense in paying more than that now.

Recent bargains include:

The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano, $1.00. This was the hardback version as well. I gave it to David Norman, since I already had the paperback.

The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer, $1.00. hardback. The best of the World War II novels.

Edmund Wilson: A Life in Literature by Lewis Dabney, $4.98 in the Barnes&Noble clearance rack. The greatest critic of 20th century literature, Wilson knew and worked with everyone, Fitzgerald, Edna St. Vincent Millay, W.H. Auden, Nabokov, T.S. Eliot. His Axel's Castle introduced American readers to Joyce and Proust. Incredible life story.

Uncensored: Essays by Joyce Carol Oates, $4.98 also in the B&N clearance. Essays and reviews on writers and writing. I like her better than Harold Bloom, with his obsession with Wm. Shakespeare.

You Don't Love Me Yet by Jonathan Lethem, $1.00 in paperback. Lethem's California novel of an indie band. Lethem is in The New Yorker, the NY Times Book Review, and on the cover of Poets&Writers, which is the marketing equivalent of being on fire.

I'd recommend all these books to serious readers, even at retail price. But at my price, they read better.