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YOU ARE BUYING 2 SIGNED FIRST EDITION BOOKS by FAMOUS AUTHOR JANE SMILEY== they are as follows

GREENLANDERS

SIGNED by JANE SMILEY

by Jane Smiley

Published by Alfred Knopf, New York

 1988 Stated FIRST EDITION

This book is a HARDCOVER in near fine condition with 558 pages and map endpages.

The price clipped dust jacket is near fine condition. 

SIGNED by JANE SMILEY

The Greenlanders is a 1988 historical-fiction epic novel by American author Jane Smiley.

The novel gives a speculative account of the Norse inhabitation of Greenland in the 14th and 15th centuries,

written in the style of an Icelandic or Norse saga.

CONTENTS

List of Characters

RICHES

THE DEVIL

LOVE

Epilogue

Plot​  == The Greenlanders describes the daily affairs of Nordic settlers living in medieval southern Greenland, including marriages, births, deaths, famines, epidemics, trials at the Thing, church affairs, land feuds, seal hunts, military invasions, and encounters with Greenland's aboriginal inhabitants.

In particular, the book follows the lives of Gunnar Asgeirsson, an unlucky, violent, litigious man, and his sister, Margret Asgeirsdottir, a quiet, solitary, melancholic woman on their homestead in the Vatnahverfi district. Though the novel also follows the lives of many other Greenlanders, Gunnar and Margret function as the novel's protagonists. The novel also features several historically documented individuals and events in Greenland and elsewhere, including the spread of Islam into southern Europe, assaults on Greenlanders' settlements by English raiders, and the witchcraft trial of Kolgrim.

Reception​ ==The Greenlanders was reviewed favorably. Kirkus Reviews called it a "bleak, stirring picture of the slow slouch towards the death of a civilization." In a 2010 Time article, American author Jonathan Franzen included it in his list of influential books, and in an interview with Big Think, Franzen said, "I do not know of a better American novel within the last twenty years" than The Greenlanders.

REVIEW == Jane Smiley has produced a bulky, sometimes spectacular saga of 14th-century Greenland—a tapestry of hunger, revenge and the disintegration of social institutions. Since the tenth century, Norsemen had farmed and hunted from spring until fall, trying to amass enough food to survive the winters. Smiley's novel plops down at a crucial turning point: the Plague has hit Europe hard, and contact with the continent (as well as the all-important inflow of churchmen) is falling off. Meanwhile, Asgeir Gunnarsson is at odds with his strange neighbors at Ketils Stead. When Asgeir murders a woman he believes to be a witch, the bishop awards the use of his prime field to his hatred rivals. This bitterness trickles down to the next generation—to quiet Gunnar and his sister Margret, whose ancestral stead is eventually usurped by the politically adept Ketils Stead crowd. Winter starvation has always been common, but a vomiting ill and a string of bad hunts prompts widespread death. Amidst the marriages; births and grievances, the bishop dies. The priests are now a low-profile lot, except for former cowherd Larus, who's turning some heads with his apocalyptic visions.


And Bjorn Bollason, the lawspeaker, is benevolent and popular at first, but he gets impressed by talky visitors from Iceland and allows them to burn wild Koll-grim, Gunnar's son, at the stake. The annual "Thing" melts down into a bloody melee, pirates plunder and kill, and the saddened Greenlanders bury their dead. Into this icy historical vacuum—the period between the end of outside contact and the eventual disappearance of the Greenland settlers—Smiley pours a thin-broth existence, flavored in spots by dramatic events and complicated emotional relationships. Particularly interesting: the portrayal of the spiritual life as a bleak—and without priests—unconvincing go-round of tithes and half-remembered prayers. Smiley's uninflated prose lulls at first, but gradually accumulates the incantory power of a strange winter-told tale. A bleak, stirring picture of the slow slouch towards the death of a civilization.


DUPLICATE  KEYS

SIGNED by JANE SMILEY
by Jane Smiley


Published by Jonathan Cape London England


1984 BRITISH FIRST EDITION


This book is a HARDCOVER in near fine condition with 306 pages.

The dust jacket is near fine condition.


Author's Third Book.


SIGNED by JANE SMILEY


FROM THE COVER == As a general rule, lending keys is a very unwise practice Detective Honey said too late.

There were two full pages of people who had keys to the apartment where the murder took place.

It was the no-nonsense librarian Alice Marie Ellis who found the bodies of her friends, failed rock-stars Denny Minehart and Craig Shellady, in their usual arm-chairs.

Rolling Stone had once - and only once - written a piece about the victims band Deep Six and Alice only hoped that although professionally they had drifted into oblivion,

the magazine would at least acknowledge their passing. Alice failed to understand why she couldn't feel shocked over this still-life of dead friends.


Detective Honey's words 'killer danger 'pathological' startled her: she hadn't thought of it in such dynamic terms.

The now depopulated group of friends had been closely knit since they drifted to New York about the time of that one Deep Six hit single.

Detective Honey suspected them all. He could see the murderer in everyone.

The 'citizen' in Alice was intrigued by Honey and she wanted to get to the bottom of things herself. She could also see that he was right - she was in danger.

As she talked to Denny's bereaved lover Susan, it seemed to Alice that they were examining their whole lives - seeking some key beyond the solution to a murder mystery, some knowledge about all of them that only the understanding of an irreducible fact like a murder could give.


Jane Smiley's novel is not only a-taut and compelling thriller, but an exceptionally arresting view of people's loyalties and entanglements.

Friendship, sex cocaine success, tedium and disappointment can pull human affairs into strange configurations. Murder is but one of the consequences.        


REVIEW == Alice Ellis is a Midwestern refugee living in Manhattan. Still recovering from a painful divorce, she depends on the companionship and camaraderie of tightly knit circle of friends. At the center of this circle is a rock band struggling to navigate New York’s erratic music scene, and an apartment/practice space with approximately fifty key-holders. One sunny day, Alice enters the apartment and finds two of the band members shot dead.

As the double-murder sends waves of shock through their lives, this group of friends begins to unravel, and dangerous secrets are revealed one by one.

When Alice begins to notice things amiss in her own apartment, the tension breaks out as it occurs to her that she is not the only person with a key, and she may not get a chance to change the locks. Jane Smiley applies her distinctive rendering of time, place, and the enigmatic intricacies of personal relationships to the twists and turns of suspense. The result is a brilliant literary thriller that will keep readers guessing up to its final, shocking conclusion.


MORE ABOUT == Jane Smiley (born September 26, 1949) is an American novelist. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1992 for her novel A Thousand Acres 1991. Born in Los Angeles, California, Smiley grew up in Webster Groves, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis, and graduated from Community School and from John Burroughs School. She obtained a BA in literature at Vassar College (1971), then earned an MA (1975), MFA (1976), and PhD (1978) from the University of Iowa.

While working toward her doctorate, she also spent a year studying in Iceland as a Fulbright Scholar.

From 1981 to 1996 she was a Professor of English at Iowa State University, teaching undergraduate and graduate creative writing workshops.

In 1996, she relocated to California. She returned to teaching creative writing at the University of California, Riverside, in 2015.  


Career = Smiley published her first novel, Barn Blind, in 1980, and won a 1985 O. Henry Award for her short story "Lily", which was published in The Atlantic Monthly.

Her best-selling A Thousand Acres, a story based on William Shakespeare's King Lear, received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1992.

It was adapted into a film of the same title in 1997.

Her novella The Age of Grief was made into the 2002 film The Secret Lives of Dentists.

Her essay "Feminism Meets the Free Market" was included in the 2006 anthology Mommy Wars  by Washington Post writer Leslie Morgan Steiner.

Her essay "Why Bother?" appears in the anthology Knitting Yarns: Writers on Knitting, published by W. W. Norton & Company in 2013.

Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel (2005), is a non-fiction meditation on the history and the nature of the novel, somewhat in the tradition of E. M. Forster's seminal Aspects of the Novel, that roams from eleventh century Japan's Murasaki Shikibu's The Tale of Genji to 21st-century American women's literature.


In 2001, Smiley was elected a member of The American Academy of Arts and Letters.

She has participated in the annual Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, the Cheltenham Festival, the National Book Festival,

the Hay Festival of Literature and the Arts, and many others.


She won the PEN USA Lifetime Achievement Award in 2006, and chaired the judges' panel for the prestigious Man Booker International Prize in 2009.

Jonathan Franzen, author of The Corrections (2001), considers Smiley's book The Greenlanders to be greatly underappreciated and among the best works of contemporary American fiction.


Smiley's most recent works are a trilogy of novels about an Iowa family over the course of generations.

The first novel of the trilogy, Some Luck, was published in 2014 by Random House.

The second volume followed in the spring of 2015, and the third volume in the fall of 2015.


Awards

In 2006 Jane Smiley received the Fitzgerald Award for Achievement in American Literature award which is given annually in Rockville Maryland,

the city where Fitzgerald, his wife, and his daughter are buried as part of the F. Scott Fitzgerald Literary Festival.


Novels


Barn Blind (1980)

At Paradise Gate (1981)

Duplicate Keys (1984)

The Greenlanders (1988)

A Thousand Acres (1991)

Moo (1995)

The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton (1998)

Horse Heaven (2000)

Good Faith (2003)

Ten Days in the Hills (2007)

Private Life (2010)

Some Luck (2014)

Early Warning (April, 2015)

Golden Age (October 20, 2015)

Perestroika in Paris (2020)


Short story collections

The Age of Grief (1987)

Ordinary Love & Good Will (1989)


Non-fiction books

Catskill Crafts (1988)

Charles Dickens (2003)

A Year at the Races: Reflections on Horses, Humans, Love, Money, and Luck (2004)

Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel (2005)

The Man Who Invented The Computer (2010)


Young adult novels

The Georges and the Jewels (2009)

A Good Horse (2010)

True Blue (2011)

Pie in the Sky (2012)

Gee Whiz (2013)

Riding Lessons (2018)

Saddles and Secrets (2019)

Taking the Reins (2020)


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