25 “A Screaming Comes Across The Sky”: First Edition Of Gravity’s Rainbow 29PYNCHON, Thomas. Gravity’s Rainbow. New York, 1973. Octavo, original red cloth, dust jacket. $3500 First edition of Pynchon’s National Book Awardwinning third novel. “One of the few truly great novels of the century, and at the same time one of the most disappointing, disturbing, maddening…. One of the most original fictive styles to have been developed since Joyce” (Contemporary Novelists, 1136). “Its technical and verbal resources bring to mind Melville, Faulkner and Nabokov” (New York Times Books of the Century, 487). Mead A3a. Bookplate. Book fine, price-clipped dust jacket nearly so. A beautiful copy. “One Of The Four Or Five Funniest Comic Novels Written In This Century” 30AMIS, Kingsley. Lucky Jim. London, 1953. Octavo, original green paper boards, dust jacket, custom clamshell box. $7200 First edition of Amis’ first and most famous novel— ”brilliantly and preposterously funny” (Guardian), in original dust jacket. Hailed as “one of the four or five funniest comic novels written in this century,” Lucky Jim is Kingsley Amis’ first novel, a biting satire that “brought its author fame as one of Britain’s Angry Young Men.” To writer Paul Fussell, Amis stood as one of his generation’s finest satirists “and belonged in ‘the company of Swift, Pope, Twain, Flaubert and Mencken” (New York Times). This “brilliantly and preposterously funny book” remains Amis’ best known novel (Guardian). Gift inscription dated year of publication. Book fine; mild soiling, trace of edge-wear with small bit of expert repair to verso of bright near-fine dust jacket.
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