First printing of Portis's eternally underrated masterwork.
Near fine in near fine jacket.
Price: $400.00
"People do not give it credence that a fourteen-year-old girl could leave home and go off in the wintertime to avenge her father's blood but it did not seem so strange then, although I will say it did not happen every day."
In his second novel, Portis produced the most singular, grim and resolute voice of any narrator in literature, excepting perhaps Jane Eyre. Donna Tartt, eulogizing Portis poignantly and well in June of this year, wrote that he "caught better than any writer then alive the complex and highly inflected regional vernacular I heard spoken as a child — mannered and quaint, old-fashioned and highly constructed but also blunt, roughshod, lawless, inflected by Shakespeare and Tennyson and King James but also by agricultural gazetteers and frilly old Christian pamphlets, by archaic dictionaries of phrase and fable, by the voices of mule drivers and lady newspaper poets and hanging judges and hellfire preachers." A lovely copy of a book that is every bit as good as people say.
Read more: "Donna Tartt on the Singular Voice, and Pungent Humor, of Charles Portis," The New York Times.
New York: Simon and Schuster, (1968). 7.75'' x 5.5''. Original blue-gray cloth. In original unclipped ($4.95) dust jacket. Ochre endpapers. 215 pages. Previous owner's signature in pencil to front endpaper, dated 1968. Small blue pen circle on copyright page, interior otherwise unmarked. Boards faintly sunned at upper edges. Minor shelfwear and traces of soil to jacket, with two small closed tears to front and rear panels.
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