15 LITERATURE “The Greatest English Novels Of This Century” 15MANTEL, Hilary. Wolf Hall. WITH: Bring Up the Bodies. WITH: The Mirror and the Light. London, 2009, 2012, 2020. Together, three volumes. Thick octavo, original black and blue cloth, dust jackets. $5200 First trade editions of Mantel’s acclaimed historical trilogy, each book signed by the author. An “arch, elegant, richly detailed biographical novel centered on [Thomas] Cromwell… Mantel can see the understated heroism in the skilled administrator’s day-to-day decisions in service of a well-ordered civil society… Wolf Hall is both spellbinding and believable” (New York Times). “With this trilogy, Mantel has redefined what the historical novel is capable of; she has given it muscle and sinew, enlarged its scope, and created a prose style that is lyrical and colloquial, at once faithful to its time and entirely recognisable to us. Taken together, her Cromwell novels are, for my money, the greatest English novels of this century” (Stephanie Merritt, The Guardian). The first two novels each won the prestigious Man Booker Prize, and the final book was longlisted; in the award’s history, “no one had won with a sequel, and no one had won so soon after winning the first time” (New York Times). Fine copies. “The Dead Are A Heap More Trouble Than The Living” 14O’CONNOR, Flannery. The Complete Stories. New York, 1971. Octavo, original green cloth, dust jacket. $800 First edition of O’Connor’s complete short fiction. O’Connor, widely regarded as “at least the equal of any American writer of short stories” (Books of the Century, 519), created tales marked by “the macabre and the darkly, crazily ecstatic” (Stringer, 503). O’Connor believed “a story is a way to say something that can’t be said any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is. You tell a story because a statement would be inadequate. When anybody asks what a story is about, the only proper thing is to tell them to read the story. The meaning of fiction is not abstract meaning but experienced meaning” (Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose). “She saw herself as ‘a Catholic peculiarly possessed of the modern consciousness’ and saw the South as ‘Christ-haunted’” (New Yorker). “Today, Flannery [O’Connor] is widely regarded as one of the greatest novelists, short-story writers and Catholic apologists of the 20th century” (National Catholic Register). Book very nearly fine with a tiny bit of staining to text block fore-edge; dust jacket fine. A beautiful copy, unusual in this condition.
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