THE LIBRARY OF AMERICA
The Library of America, a nonprofit publisher and educational outreach entity, was founded in 1979 with grants from the Ford Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Although its mission was a well-grounded and no-nonsense business approach to publishing, it essentially was fulfilling a long-held dream by the great critic Edmund Wilson and others. The United States of America, they felt, ought to have a publications series of high standards and high quality of production for its national literature, and it ought to reflect the diversity and traditions of all of its writing.
The first books appeared in 1982, when I first began selling new books in an independent book store here in Carlisle. (The founding of Whistlestop Bookshop was three years away.) I still have my copies of Hawthorne, Melville, and Whitman. I won’t tell you how many of the 300+ to date I have acquired, but I am happy to say I never regretted one. The books are remarkably beautiful and efficient and scholarly and finely-made. They are sometimes the only respectable edition available (beware of photo-offset print-on-demand editions!). The accompanying chronologies and notes and textual discussions of every volume are a joy and an education. I cannot praise them too highly.
This listing is what I carry in the store. If you would like other volumes, send me an e-mail or call the store. Enjoy browsing, buying, and owning landmark definitive editions of great writers or great American subjects.
The listings are alphabetical by author except for new or recent anthologies at the top. Older anthologies are at the bottom of the page.
All James Baldwin titles and Ursula K. Le Guin titles are on the respective pages of the authors.
Sleep with Slander [Jim Sader Detective Novel #2]
Sleep with Slander [Jim Sader Detective Novel #2]
Private eye Jim Sader returns in this hard-hitting thriller. A hunt for a kidnapped boy leads through a labyrinth of well-hidden family secrets into the heart of an elaborate and malevolent deception. With little to go on—a tightlipped client, an anonymous letter, a mother who is supposed to be dead—Sader must rely on his wits to find the child even as he outraces the personal demons that dog him. Sleep with Slander is a masterpiece in the classic hardboiled tradition, tough, compassionate, and tautly told.
Dolores Hitchens (1907–1973) was a highly prolific author who wrote under several names. She is one of eight midcentury masters collected in the Library of America edition Women Crime Writers: Four Suspense Novels of the 1950s.
Steph Cha is the author of Your House Will Pay and the Juniper Song crime trilogy.