Spartina ("SIGNED!" - Stated First Edition/Stated First Print - F/VF with F/VF DJ - "Scarce Title/Very Scarce Autograph")

by John Casey

Price: $100.00

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Knoph, New York NY (1989) HC w/ DJ, Signed on Title page, Stated First Edition/Stated First Print (Copyright date on Title page and Copyright page, Copyright page further states: First Edition, Copyright page Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data numbers read: PS3553.A79334S64 1989 813'.54 88-45765, jacket's back inner flap states: Alfred A. Knopf 6/89), 8vo, 375 pages; Book: F/VF, clean, tight and sound, near as new, appears a once read or an unread, nothing derogatory of note, gray boards with creme cloth spine and spine-turns, bright gilt lettering impressed to spine; Pages: F/VF, clean, white and secure, fancy teal stained top edges, fancy deckled fore-edges, fancy map illustrated gray paste-downs and end-papers, book appears to be proof or review copy with underlings, margin notes, margin blocking, circled page numbers, proof/review symbols throughout book, but no name to attach to it, all pages still very readable; DJ: F/VF, clean and bright, original jacket illustration by Joanie Schwartz, crinkling to lower left bottom shows particularly when held to light, elsewise nothing derogatory of note, not clipped, price still showing on upper right corner to front inner flap with notation, FPT, to upper left corner (not a remainder/not a book club ed./not a Library ed.) Synopsis: As Gail Godwin noted, "A real love story for grownup people, I kept thinking as I read it, Wouldn't D.H. Lawrence love this book." The book she celebrates -- a response echoed by critics and readers everywhere -- is, Spartina, a National Book Award winner for 1989. It richly confirms John Casey as a major American writer. The author of the blockbuster bestselling, American Romance, gives us a new novel that is passionate, romantic, dramatic, adventurous, wise, funny, and profoundly moving. It is about Dick Pierce --- fisherman, father, lover, angry man, and one of the most memorable (flawed) heroes in recent fiction. It is about his two worlds: the fishing village of Galilee, Rhode Island, and its surrounding terrain of salt ponds, marshes, creeks, and hills, some of it once his family's land, now colonized by summer people, the careless rich swept in on a tide of money and fun; and, out there, away, the sea, where you can either work on other men's boats, or if you're shrews enough, you can end up owning your own boat, and be master of your life. Dick could never afford to buy such a boat, but he can build one, and slowly, incredibly, at the cost of every spare hour of his time and every extra cent he earns, his obsession is taking shape in his backyard: a fifty foot fishing boat with an eighteen foot beam, now half built, and as he says, "damn near as big as my house." --- his, Spartina. Yet now is the summer of his discontent. He's forty, and poor. His anger -- the bank won't loan him money to finish Spartina -- his guilt over what he's doing to his wife, May, and his two boys, his aching regret at the disappearance of his old world and his envy of the slick, quick newcomers -- the "players" -- who are buying it up, are all coming together in an ominously combustible mixture. Egged on by his wild-eyed, not-quite-friend, Parker, and watched with a sharp eye of concern by "The Law", which happens to take its local form in beautiful, ex-rich-kid Elsie Burrrick, Dick begins to cut corners, to take chances, to "play". As his dangerous games put him closer to getting Spartina into the water and farther and farther away from his marriage, he and Elsie are drawn into a passionate affair. And as we watch him in the double-storm that breaks over him -- a storm of emotions on the land and a terrifying storm of proportions that overtakes him and Spartina at sea -- we feel our own lives illuminated in a fierce and intimate way. John Casey's writing -- which joins uncompromising realism and lyrical revelations of the endless, secret complexities of ordinary human beings -- goes for the throat and to the bone. This was Mr. Casey's 3rd work.