Search Results: Authors starting with K from Honey & Wax Booksellers

New York: Berkley Publishing Corporation, 1956. First edition of this midcentury anthology, containing the first appearance of film critic Pauline Kael's manifesto "Movies, the Desperate Art." Published while Kael was struggling to manage a two-screen art house in Berkeley, this essay predates her hiring at The New Yorker by a dozen years. The concerns that dominate Kael's later criticism are already evident in this early salvo: her contempt for bland, bloated studio productions; her attraction to "individual creative responsibility" in directors and actors; her distrust of overtly moralizing and edifying pictures; and her celebration of the movies as "an extraordinary education of the senses." Most notably, she insists on taking the movies seriously, however "desperate" that art may be: "Object to the Hollywood film and you're an intellectual snob, object to the avant-garde films and you're a Philistine. But, while in Hollywood, one must often be a snob; in avant-garde circles one must often be a… Read More

New York, 1903. Original illustration by American artist Arthur Keller (1866-1924) for William Dean Howells's 1903 collection of essays, Heroines of Fiction. In that work, Howells considers the Victorian clergyman Charles Kingsley's 1853 novel Hypatia, a fictionalized life of the pagan philosopher, set in fourth-century Alexandria. Hypatia was one of the first women to study mathematics, astronomy, and philosophy. Murdered by a Christian mob for her outspoken Neoplatonist teachings, she became a symbol for feminists and a martyr for pagans. In Keller's striking portrait, Hypatia's open pose and concentration on her manuscript convey classical self-possession, but her pale skin and tousled ringlets reflect Kingsley's Victorian vision. Howells remarks: "Hypatia is really a young lady of the early eighteen-fifties, of the time when young ladies of her type were crudely called strong-minded. She was a sort of Alexandrian Margaret Fuller." A source of inspiration across centuries, Hypatia most recently… Read More

London: Michael Joseph, 1961. First edition of Mary Kelly's acclaimed novel, winner of the 1961 Gold Dagger Award, issued by the Crime Writers' Association of the United Kingdom for an outstanding work of crime fiction. When a body is found in a vat of liquid clay at Shentall's, an English pottery of sterling reputation, the detective investigating the leak of the firm's proprietary designs finds himself at the center of a much more serious case. The Spoilt Kill was among the first British crime novels to mark a shift toward the psychological, establishing Kelly as a master of the genre: "It wasn't the whine or cringe of self-pity, just a dull resentful disgust for circumstances and his inability to get clear of them, disgust for himself, that was too weak to possess the dignity of utter humility; a wriggle rather than a writhe." The novel also offers an unusually detailed inside look at the business side of the decorative arts, from production processes to industrial espionage. A near-fine example… Read More