"STRANGE AND FRESH AND HILARIOUS": INSCRIBED BY CHARLES PORTIS

PORTIS, Charles. The Dog of the South. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979. Octavo, original half ivory cloth, original dust jacket, custom half green morocco clamshell box. $4000.

First edition of the third novel by Portis—author of True Grit and "possibly the nation's best unknown writer"—a handsome copy in the original dust jacket, inscribed by the author on the front free endpaper: "For J— C—, the Buick driver of Spokane, with best regards, Charles Portis Aug. 15 1994 Little Rock."

To author Donna Tartt, his "pitch was pure… pick up any novel by Portis and open it to any page and you will find something so devastatingly strange and fresh and hilarious that you will want to run into the next room and read it aloud to somebody… I've loved his work all my life—Dog of the South is a family favorite" (New York Times). At his death in early 2020 Portis, best known for True Grit (1968), "left us with five impeccable novels" (New Yorker). "Possibly the nation's best unknown writer… Portis evokes an eccentric, absurd world with a completely straight face… in one way or another the subtext of all these novels is the great Melvillean theme of the American weakness for secret conspiracies and arcane knowledge, and our embrace of con men, scam artists and flimflammers of every sort" (New York Times). Critic Ron Rosembaum calls Portis "perhaps the most original, indescribable sui generis talent overlooked by literary culture in America… [he] captures the secret soul of 20th-century America with the clarity, the melancholy, and the laughter with which Gogol captured the soul of 19th-century Russia in Dead Souls'" (Esquire). "First Edition" stated on copyright page; price of $8.95 on dust jacket front flap. Small authentication sticker to front free endpaper verso. Upper text block edges with small stamp of a building.

Book in fine condition, in a very nearly fine dust jacket with slight wear to spine foot and bookseller's small sticker to back flap. A handsome signed copy.