Sunday, January 01, 2006

From Virginia Woolf to Kimberly Kemp

Here's a list of the books I've bought recently and to which I've referred earlier. The list is in random order, as indeed all are my books (I've been toying with the idea of setting the books in order: they've been a mess after me moved - almost two years ago!). Many of the following cost only 50 cents a piece, so don't wonder if there are some pieces of utter crap here.

Hubert Selby: Last Exit to Brooklyn (I read this some 15 years ago, but for some reason have never bought the book; the Finnish translation is a bit of a rarity, someone should reissue it)

Elmore Leonard: La Brava (the Finnish translation is bad, so I decided I need the English version)

Elmore Leonard: Rum Punch, in translation (I'm not sure if I have this already, but this cost only 20 cents, so what the heck)

Irving Shulman: The Notorious Landlady (Fawcett Gold Medal # 1197; Shulman's novelization of the Robert Quine film from the Margery Sharp short story; somewhat criminous comedy; Shulman also wrote the novelization of West Side Story and some tough-guy novels and films, too)

Gypsy Rose Lee: Gypsy. A Memoir (this came with four or five Swedish Western paperbacks and Konrad Lorenz's Man and Dog, for only 25 cents for the whole pack! I just had to pick them up...)

Winston Groom: Better Times than These (I have a small collection of novels about the Vietnam war; only later I realized that Groom wrote Forrest Gump, which I absolutely and dearly hated)

Edwin P. Hoyt: Farlig kust (Swedish translation of Hellfire in Napoli, Pinnacle 197-something; this goes to Pulp to be used as an illustration in the pirate issue; it seems that Edwin P. Hoyt is (or was?) really a naval war historian, who penned also some war paperbacks)

Kimberly Kemp: Operation Sex, in translation (I pick up every copy of sixties/seventies sleaze paperbacks I see and this one was in a great condition and the Cocktail series in which it was published has become rather rare these days; I don't know who Kemp is - probably Earl Kemp himself?!)

Virginia Woolf: Flush. A biography (you don't have any other blog in which these two titles are mentioned in the same post!)

Mike McCray: D.C. Death March, in translation (stupid looking men's adventure stuff from the early eighties, written by openly gay Michael McDowell under a house pseudonym)

Dan Logan: Mad Maverick, in translation (short Australian digest-sized Western paperback, bought mainly for the Rafael De Soto artwork - will post the scan later on)

Carter Brown: Busted Wheeler, in translation (one of the later entries in the long series, with sexed-up plots)

Ville Paakonmaa: Bileamin varjo (= The Shadow of Bileam), a self-published Finnish fantasy novel from 1972

Wayne D. Overholser: The Bitter Night, in translation (one of the better Western paperbackers of the fifties and sixties)

Norman Hartley: The Viking Process, in translation (a spy novel from the seventies, bought mainly for the great Finnish cover illustration by one Pekka Hesanto, which I will post in due time)

Evan Hunter: The Blackboard Jungle, in translation (for some reason, I've never read this)

Stephen Frances: This Woman Is Death, in translation (from the inventor of Hank Janson, one of the books in Frances' late John Gail series; I was very, very fond of his The Sad and Tender Flesh from the same series)

Peter Townend: Fisheye, in translation (a British thriller from early seventies, published in Finnish as a paperback)

Maysie Greig: Cloak and Dagger Love, in translation (a romance paperback from a veteran of the genre; I'll be doing an article about romance writers who started out in pulps and Greig is one of them)

Janet Evanovich: Manhunt, in translation (the bestselling novelist's early romance paperback; Evanovich is of course best known for her Stephanie Plum series of humorous crime novels)

Willo Davis Roberts: Nurse Kay's Conquest, in translation (Roberts is one of the most revered romance paperback writers - or actually was, since she died in 2004)

That was only the first stack... there's at least another one waiting for me... (I'll continue this tomorrow.)

One of the best finds was Daniel Paul Schreber's Memoir of My Nervous Illness (Dawson & Sons, 1955, with a dustjacket). Schreber's book is about his nervous breakdown in 1884 and his time in the mental institution. Freud used the book very much and it's become somewhat of a cult item. I found this for 20 cents - Abebooks has some ten copies of the same edition, with the cheapest one being 35 $! I'll give the book away to my friend Jussi, who said he will use it his studies. He needs it more than I do, even though I'd certainly love to have the book of this kind in my shelves.

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