IN THE SKIN OF A LION (SIGNED)
by ONDAATJE, MICHAEL
- New
- Hardcover
- Signed
- first
- Condition
- New/New
- ISBN 10
- 0394563638
- ISBN 13
- 9780394563633
- Seller
-
Monkton, Maryland, United States
Payment Methods Accepted
About This Item
HARDCOVER. SIGNED in Person at the Book Signing Event. IN THE SKIN OF A LION by Michael Ondaatje (1987). SIGNED by the author, Michael Ondaatje, to the Full Title page. Like Brand New. This is a First Edition, First Printing copy, as stated on the copyright page. Dust jacket is also Like Brand new. A small red line on the bottom edge only with no other tears, marks, creases, or library markings. Not inscribed to anyone. Not price clipped, not a Book Club Edition (BCE), or signed on a bookplate. True Collectible Quality. First Edition, First Printing, hand SIGNED to full title page. No inscription; full signature only. From an event featuring Michael Ondaatje in New York City on May 11, 2018. FREE: The complete bookstore's May 2018 event flyer is included. The book will be carefully wrapped and mailed via USPS with free Delivery Confirmation. **** Michael Ondaatje is the author of seven novels, a memoir, a nonfiction book on film, and several books of poetry. The English Patient won the Booker Prize; Anil's Ghost won the Irish Times International Fiction Prize, the Giller Prize, and the Prix Médicis. His latest novel, Warlight, was published on May 8, 2018, and has been listed for the 2018 Man Booker Prize. ISBN: 978-0394-5636-33. BS12262.
Synopsis
Author of eleven books of poetry, four novels and a fictionalized memoir, Michael Ondaatje was born in 1943 in Colombo, capital of the British colony of Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). Of Tamil, Sinhalese and Dutch descent, he was the youngest of four children. He grew up during the halcyon days of colonial Ceylon on the Kutapitiya tea estate, “the most beautiful place in the world,” as he described in an interview with The Guardian . His mother’s real gift to Michael was her enthusiasm for the arts. Of his father, who served in the Ceylon light infantry, Ondaatje has said: “My father was in tea and alcohol; he dealt in tea and he drank the alcohol.” He died of a brain hemorrhage after Michael had left Sri Lanka, so Michael never got to know his father as an adult. “He is still one of those books we long to read whose pages remain uncut. He was a sad and mercurial figure. There was a lot I didn’t know about him … In all my books there are mysteries that are not fully told.” When Michael was five his parents separated. His mother soon went to England with two of her children; Michael stayed behind and lived with relatives, joining his mother and siblings at the age of eleven. He relinquished his sarong and donned a tie – an item of clothing he’d never seen before – to attend Dulwich College, whose alumni include writers Graham Swift, P. G. Wodehouse and Raymond Chandler. (One of Michael’s former teachers expressed surprise when Ondaatje won the Booker, since he had “always seemed more interested in cricket.”) In 1962, at the age of nineteen, he went to Quebec, where his brother Christopher (today a businessman and explorer) was living. It was in Canada that Michael Ondaatje’s writing life began in earnest: “[Y]ou felt you could do anything. I wouldn’t have been a writer if I’d stayed in England … where you feel, what right do you have to do this because of John Donne and Sir Philip Sidney. England felt repressive in the fifties … Moving, you learn twice as much; it doubles you in some way, like living three or four lives.” Ondaatje obtained a B.A. from the University of Toronto and an M.A. from Queen’s University, then taught at the University of Western Ontario and at York University. In the seventies he edited poetry, produced anthologies and critical works and short documentary films, and began his involvement with the small press Coach House. Although he was thrust onto the world stage by the tremendous success of The English Patient , Ondaatje, who lives in Toronto, remains an intensely private person. “Privacy is essential,” he says. “I’ve seen a lot of writers being interpreted by their personalities – Ginsberg, Layton …You want the book to be read, not the author.” When he won the Booker Prize in 1992, he used the money to inaugurate the Gratiaen award – named after his mother – as an annual literary prize for Sri Lankan writers. In his writing Ondaatje employs a technique of blurring fact and fiction in an imaginative collage. His longer narrative works, often based on the unorthodox lives of real people, contain fact alongside fiction. For example, in Coming Through Slaughter he relates the real and imagined life of New Orleans jazz musician Buddy Bolden; in Running in the Family , he writes a fictionalized memoir of the unconventional life of his parents and grandparents in colonial Ceylon. Some of Ondaatje’s major influences come from Henri Rousseau paintings, Diego Rivera murals, Sri Lankan temple sculpture and, most of all, the music and rhythms of jazz. “If I could be Fats Waller, I wouldn’t be writing.”
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Details
- Bookseller
- Charm City Books (US)
- Bookseller's Inventory #
- BS12262
- Title
- IN THE SKIN OF A LION (SIGNED)
- Author
- ONDAATJE, MICHAEL
- Format/Binding
- HARDCOVER w/ Dust Jacket Cover
- Book Condition
- New New
- Jacket Condition
- New
- Quantity Available
- 1
- Edition
- FIRST EDITION, FIRST PRINTING
- Binding
- Hardcover
- ISBN 10
- 0394563638
- ISBN 13
- 9780394563633
- Publisher
- Knopf; 1st American ed edition (August 12, 1987)
- Place of Publication
- UNITED STATES
- Date Published
- August 12, 1987
- Keywords
- Literary, United States, Literature & Fiction, Books
- Bookseller catalogs
- SIGNED BOOKS;
Terms of Sale
Charm City Books
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About the Seller
Charm City Books
About Charm City Books
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- First Edition
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- Jacket
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- Bookplate
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