2 products
Frank Norris
The Pit
9781455629060
Regular price $20.00 Save Liquid error (snippets/product-template line 248): Computation results in '-Infinity'%Financial ambition, a tortured marriage, and an American city on the rise are brilliantly depicted in Frank Norris’ 1903 masterpiece. Curtis Jadwin is obsessed with speculating on the market, manipulating it so he can control the nation’s wheat supply. He neglects his wife, Laura, who seeks refuge in the arts, and in particular one artist, Sheldon Corthell. The Jadwin’s wealth buys them a mansion on Lincoln Park with an art gallery that strangers gawk at, but inside they struggle. And is Jadwin’s gambling sustainable, or is there a bear market in his future?
Curtis and Laura play out this American Dream scenario in the streets of Chicago, where they attend the opera at the Auditorium Building, visit the new art museum on the lake, and, from the comfort of their carriage, watch the trains and grain elevators. At the Board of Trade, in the pit, men yell and knock against each other, performing the theater of capitalism in front of an always crowded visitor’s gallery.
Few novels depict the struggles of marriage, the world of finance, or the rise of Chicago from the flatlands of the Midwest, as viscerally as this novel, originally published in 1903. Norris’s novel may immerse readers in a historic setting, but it’s punishing and profound themes are anything but dated.
This Belt Revivals edition features archival photographs and an introduction by Whet Moser.
Glenway Wescott
Goodbye, Wisconsin
9781540270313
Regular price $20.00 Save Liquid error (snippets/product-template line 248): Computation results in '-Infinity'%A collection of stories, originally published in 1928, from the author of The Grandmothers and The Pilgrim Hawk.
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A couple set fire to an old farmhouse to collect insurance money. A groom contemplates an old sexual escapade while he waits for his bride at the altar. A young farm boy returns to tell his brother about his capers while stationed in France in the Navy. The eleven stories in this collection, including an introductory essay by Wescott on returning to his parents’ West Allis home outside Milwaukee, deal with themes of exile—often self-imposed—and return.
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This Belt Revivals edition features a new introduction by Patrick Nathan.Â
