MATILDA
Lovely first US edition of Dahl's novel, still beloved by contemporary children and nostalgic adults alike.
Fine in fine jacket.
Price: $750.00
MATILDA
"In [Matilda], the invisible act of reading assumes its visible form, the terribly fragile form of a young, unloved girl whose powers of thinking and feeling are fueled by her rage, her desire to be seen and heard and treated as worthwhile in a world that values neither depth of thought nor intensity of feeling." — Merve Emre
A model for child prodigies, a wistful dream for harried schoolteachers, a perfect librarian's pet and the avenging angel of the elementary grades — Matilda Wormwood is an icon. Like all of Dahl's books, MATILDA pops at the seams with fury and spite, and like his best books, it is furious and spiteful about the right things: hateful parents, abuse of authority, all the petty cruelties and humiliations of childhood. It is an explicitly pro-book-reading text, and what it is for goes hand in hand with what it is against: repression, injustice, and television, television, television. Despite all that rage, on the page and essentially inseparable from the page, the inscrutable operations of Nemesis posthumously rewarded the famously adaptation-hating author with not one but two highly successful adaptations of his last great work for those who would rather watch than read: the classic and faithful 1996 film starring Mara Wilson, and an ambitious and well-received 2022 musical. One must imagine Dahl's ghost furious.
Read more: Merve Emre, "Making it Big," The New York Review of Books.
The Object
(New York): Viking Kestrel, (1988). 9'' x 6''. Original quarter red cloth with gilt-stamped blue boards and gilt-lettered spine. In original unclipped ($13.95) dust jacket. Illustrations by Quentin Blake. 240 pages. Tiny red ink stain (not remainder mark) to lower edge of text block. Minor edgewear to boards and jacket.
The Fine Print
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