The Copacetic Comics Company Collections

Collections

Title	Author	Publisher	Price
We Others: New and Selected Stories	Steven Millhauser	Alfred Knopf	$25.00 ($27.95 list)
Read more and comment...	Long-time Copacetic customers are well aware of how highly esteemed Mr. Millhauser is within our walls. Millhauser has painstakingly crafted a voice in writing, an approach to the material, and a fictional method that combined to create a new and potent force in literature that has produced truly remarkable works that have definitely shaped the post-'60s literature since first dawning in the 1972 novel Edwin Mullhouse. Here we have seven new stories together with selections from four of his previously published story collections that we have been persistently touting here for the past decade. We would like to assure anyone reading this who has yet to succumb to our persuasions that this fine volume will provide an excellent entry point to one of the most singular, pleasurable and uncanny bodies of work they are likely to ever come across. Long-time readers of Millhauser will, of course, perhaps feel a slight irritation at having to buy stories they already own, but this irritation will pass away within moments of opening the pages of this book, replaced by thankfulness and wonder.
Frida Kahlo: Song of Herself	Salomon Grimberg, Frida Kahlo	Merrell	$8.88 ($22.95 list)
Read more and comment...	There are plenty of Kahlo books out there that give a good visual overview of her paintings, but this one is unique in its insights and it contains a good number of sketches and drawings which we have never come across before, many of which are amazing! Not only that, but we made a special purchase on a number of copies and so are able to offer it at a price that makes it a great value! Here's what the publisher has to say about it: "Frida Kahlo’s extraordinary life has been well documented, but until now little has been known about the artist’s thoughts on her internal and external reality. In Song of Herself, Kahlo expert and child psychiatrist Salomon Grimberg introduces and contextualizes an intimate, deeply introspective interview that Kahlo gave towards the end of her life to her friend the psychologist Olga Campos for an unpublished book on the creative process. Kahlo comments directly and starkly as never before on her life, her loves and her art, and expresses her attitudes towards sexuality, her body, friendship, politics and death, among other personal concerns. The most revealing autobiographical text known on this singular woman, this startling interview is accompanied here by Campos’s reflections on her relationship with Kahlo and a psychological assessment of Kahlo by Dr James Bridger Harris. The book is illustrated with selected photographs and works by Kahlo, including previously unseen and rarely seen drawings."
Heat Waves in a Swamp: The Paintings of Charles Burchfield	Robert Gober, Cynthia Burlingham, Charles Burchfield	Prestel	$44.44 ($49.95 list)
Read more and comment...	Charles Burchfield is an artist whom Copacetic customers, as a population, have a strong likelihood of connecting with. He spent a fifty-year career – first in his native Ohio, after studying at the Cleveland Institue of Art, and then in upstate New York – forging a startlingly original visual language. Working primarily in watercolors, Burchfield picked up where Van Gogh left off in creating artworks that manage to visually communicate non-visual perceptions. Heat Waves In a Swamp is the catalogue of an exhibition held at the Hammer in LA, the Whitney in NYC and the Burchfield Penney Art Center in Buffalo, NY in 2009 and 2010 that was put together by independent curator, Robert Gober along with the Hammer's Cynthia Burlingham. This 184 page hardcover is edited by Burlingham and Gober, who both contribute essays along with a host of other Burchfield scholars that together work to heighten our appreciation and understanding of the artist and his work. And, it is, of course, the sterling reproductions of Burchfield's works that are the feature attraction here. The selection and its presentation are both excellent. One of the standout features of this catalogue is its inclusion of never before published notes and sketches taken from the voluminous Burchfield archives housed at the Burchfield Penney Art Center. This catalogue is far and away the best single-volume introduction to Burchfield currently available and we heartily encourage all to explore the wonders within – especially practicing artists, comics and otherwise, who stand the most to gain. Meanwhile, take a moment to explore a sample of his wide-ranging work online.
In the Penny Arcade	Steven Millhauser	Phoenix	$4.95
Read more and comment...	This collection of works from the early 1980s by Millhauser starts off with August Eschenburg, a prototypical tale which serves as the template for several later Millhauser works, most notably Martin Dressler (see below). The middle section is composed of three stylistically linked forays into the classic short story mode, each of which stages an elaborate wedding of location with season to produce an exquisite evocation of an exact yet unnameable emotion, and each of which manages to pull it off. The stories that will really having you reaching for the champagne to celebrate their success, however, are the three that close out the volume, and most especially the titular tale, In the Penny Arcade. This story reacheds the summit where so many others have fallen short in capturing that oh-so-elusive scene in which childhood ends. It distills this instant in an essence that is as momentous as it is bittersweet. This story is bracketed by a pair of equally successful distillations, first of childhood, and the other of tradition. This book is a treasure. import softcover
Her Smoke Rose Up Forever	James Tiptree Jr.	Tachyon Publications	$13.55 ($15.95 list)
Read more and comment...	This is a moment we've been waiting for for quite awhile. In our opinion, the least appreciated and most misunderstood science fiction writer of modern times, James Tiptree, Jr. (the nom de plume of Alice Sheldon) is a writer of breathtaking originality who is still ahead of her time, nearly twenty years after her death. That all of her work -- with the exception of a single "loose ends" collection that was published three years ago -- has been out of print for years is, in our opinion, a negligence that borders on the criminal. Thankfully ("Thank you, Tachyon Publications, thank you."), this situation has now come to an end with the release of this 508 page volume, a paperback re-issue of the posthumous Arkham House collection which has to stand as the best single-volume edition of her work ever released, putting together eighteen of her most penetrating and insightful stories, all of which were originally published between 1969 and 1981. Click on the image to discover the contents of this volume and learn more in our full-length review of this essential classic. Recommended!
How To Be Alone	Jonathan Franzen		$12.60 ($14.00 list)
Read more and comment...	While we're on the topic of intelligent stimulation available between two covers, we'd like to draw your attention to this fine collection of essays, also written by one of America's top contemporary fiction writers. Topics delved into here include: whether or not its worth the trouble to bother to try to write a novel in today's day and age; why perfectly intelligent people, completely aware of the risks, nevertheless continue to smoke cigarettes; how to deal with the gradual decline and death of a parent; the prison industry -- from both inside and outside the walls; a revelatory account of how we here in America have some seriously wrong ideas about privacy; and, added to this softcover edition, a new essay on William Gaddis. Smartly and persuasively written, you'll put down this book with a heightened sense of the world around you.
Autobiographical Writings, True Stories, Critical Essays, Prefaces and Collaborations with Artists	Paul Auster		$14.45 ($17.00 list)
Read more and comment...	The entire published prose oeuvre of this singular contemporary voice is now available, complete in one modestly priced, French-flapped, trade paperback edition. The Invention of Solitude, Hand To Mouth, True Stories (aka The Red Notebook - a Copacetic favorite), Gotham Handbook, The Story of My Typewriter, and Northern Lights are all here. All his previously published critical essays, prefaces, and small occasional pieces are included as well. When you feel yourself in need of some intelligent, stimulating companionship and there's no one available, this volume will fill the bill nicely.
The Disappointment Artist	Jonathan Lethem		$11.44 ($22.95 list)
Read more and comment...	Lethem's first essay collection, The Disappointment Artist is a rallying cry for fan boys of all stripes. Within its pages you will find the laid bare soul of a pop culture fiend. The novels of Philip K Dick, the comics of Jack Kirby, the films of John Cassavetes, Star Wars, The Searchers and more are shown as being worthy and sturdy foundations for building a life upon -- or at least of retreating into, to escape, if only momentarily, from the vicissitudes of fate. And there's more: a paean to the Hoyt-Schermerhorn subway station, a personal memoir of a bohemian childhood, and a charting of the formation of identity through a personal constellation of pop culture artifacts. For readers whose identities are likewise constructed out of the bric-a-brac of popular culture, ephemeral and otherwise, this is the book you've been waiting for.
Little Kingdoms	Steven Millhauser	Phoenix	$7.95
Read more and comment...	The lead story in this collection of three novellas by America's reigning master of the form, "The Little Kingdom of J. Franklin Payne" is an amazing tour de force for which the life and work of Winsor McCay serves as a springboard into a hallucinatory trip inside the mind of a powerful and obsessive creativity. We believe that this work stands to be especially appreciated by comics aficionados, and as we just secured a large quantity of the UK edition at a special price (and as the US edition is now, while not, technically, out of print, available only in a print-on-demand edition) we felt it was appropriate to bring it to our customers' attention at this time. The two additional novellas that fill out this volume are every bit as original, unique and intense: "The Princecss, the Dwarf and the Dungeon" is a magnificent deconstruction of the fairy tale that reveals its origins and functions -- social as well as psychological; and "Catalogue of the Exhibition: The Art of Edmund Moorash (1810 - 1846)" is one of the most singular works in the annals of fiction -- a turbulently romantic tale presented in the form of, as the title has it, the catalogue for an exhibition of paintings. Recommended!
Maps and Legends	Jordan Crane, Michael Chabon	McSweeney's	$22.22 ($24.00 list)
Read more and comment...	The first non-fiction collection by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Kavalier & Clay ranges from autobiographical essays (growing up in the then experimental community of Columbia, MD) to book reviews (Cormac McCarthy's The Road, for one) to artist appreciations (Howard Chaykin, Will Eisner, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle) to Judaism (Golems anyone?) and then back to memoirs (writing Mysteries of Pittsburgh, childhood encounters with literature). We can pretty much guarantee that any and all readers who are enamored of Chabon's fiction will take great pleasure in reading this volume, as the same discerning intelligence is on ample display here in sentences and paragraphs that are as finely crafted as any he has written and that will leave each reader with greater appreciations of and deeper insights into all the covered topics. And then there's the way fab, three tier, Jordan Crane dustjacket.

Mon - Thu	11 - 5
Fri & Sat	11 - 7
Sun	12 - 4