About this title: Down and out in Paris, the narrator of TROPIC OF CANCER hangs out in the Montparnasse neighborhood with fellow expatriates and artists. Told via turbulent, elaborate prose, the story is infused with graphic sexuality and sheer gusto. Originally published in 1934, TROPIC OF CANCER was banned from the U.S. until 1961; when it was finally printed ...
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Note: This is a general synopsis. Each listing is described below.
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Grove Press
Date Published: 1971
ISBN-13:9780394177601ISBN:0394177606
Description: Acceptable. Well used. Still readable but not for the collector. All orders processed within 2 business days. Ships from Foxboro MA. read more
Binding: S Mass Market Paperback
Publisher: Signet, Bergenfield, New Jersey, U.S.A.
Date Published: 1995
ISBN-13:9780451526052ISBN:0451526058
Description: As New. New and unread, square and solid with a perfect spine and sharp cover. You'll feel as though you've been transported over the hills and far away, beyond the fields we know when this book arrives at your doorstep! read more
Edition: First Thus Used
Binding: S Mass Market Paperback
Publisher: Signet, New York
Date Published: 1995
ISBN-13:9780451526052ISBN:0451526058
Description: Very Good. Mass Market Paperback A VG copy. Light wear to wraps. Age discoloration of page edges and pages. Some dog-eared pages. read more
Edition: 5th
Binding: Paper
Publisher: Grove Weidenfeld, N. Y.
Date Published: 1980
Description: Cover Art. Good. No Jacket. Trade Paperback. 8vo-over 7¾"-9¾" tall. The cover has light shelf wear with a crease down the front. Light yellowing to the pages.................The book may have minor flaws that may have gone unnoticed.... read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Grove Press
Date Published: 1994-01-06
ISBN-13:9780802131782ISBN:0802131786
Description: Good. Used for class has underlining and notes. No highlighting. Cover shows some wear or creases. Pages yellowed/tanned. You're gonna love this book! read more
Binding: Trade paperback
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic
Date Published: 1994
ISBN-13:9780802131782ISBN:0802131786
Description: Very good. No dust jacket as issued. Ex-library. Solid library reenforcment included no marks other than the ones from the library. Trade paperback (US). Glued binding. 318 p. Audience: General/trade. Comfortable reading format read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Grove Press
Date Published: 1975
ISBN-13:9780394178974ISBN:0394178971
Description: Good. 1975 First Evergreen Edition (Grove Press). previous owner's name on inside cover otherwise unmarked pages, no spine creases, light hinge crease. read more
Edition: 3rd
Binding: Paper
Publisher: Grove, New York
Date Published: 1961
Description: Good. No Jacket. Vintage Paperback. 12mo-over 6¾"-7¾" tall. Cover Price.95 cents-----The cover has shelf wear and has some creases....The spine is starting to get loose and the pages has yellowing... read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Grove Press
Date Published: 1961
Description: Good. Mild cover wear. Remember the episode of Seinfeld when Jerry was fined for not returning the book? Ha! Small note (from original owner) on inside of back cover page. some cover wear, pages okay. read more
Edition: Fourth printing; Fifth printing
Binding: Softcover
Publisher: Grove, ; Signet, 1955
Date Published: 1961
Description: An-all-nighter-with-Henry-Miller: two book offer. Tropic of Cancer: Near fine copy with slight spotting starting to inside cover. No creases but one stress area to spine; opens freely to page 94. Nights of Love and Laughter: Very good wraps with trifle spotting to edges; owner's name. Two pages have brief and neat ink underlining. Two books: read more
Binding: Trade paperback
Publisher: Grove Press/BOMC, New York
Date Published: 1993
Description: Cover art by Richard Merken. New. No dust jacket as issued. Pristine. Gift-Quality item. 318 p. 22 cm. Wonderfully bright cover art No punches pulled his most famous work, an unforgettable novel of self-confession, perhaps the most honest book ever written: autobiographical fiction about his life as an American in Paris was deemed obscene and banned from publication in this country for years. read more
"A marvelous pretention of a travel memoir from an American in Paris. More a song than a book: a love ballad to a city. In parts it reads like the surreal confessions of a sex addict. In other parts it is nothing less than a mock-serious philosophical treatis.
Tropic of Cancer is almost always as fun to read as it must have been to write. I say almost because at the outset, I kept wondering how much of his self-preening I'd let Miller get away with before I lost all interest; he can at times be highly idealistic and self-indulgent (I mean really really self-indulgent), but then I began to indulge myself in all his blarney... skimming in short to make the passages a jumble of images and impressions. Nevertheless several passages of this book I will continually return to inorder to mark the essential expressions of existential transformation, which are really the hallmark of Miller's style."
"Such a brassy show of vim shallowly belies this book's true impotence. Here we see the familiar anachronism of anti-modern emotional anarchism, with unfortunately flaccid and equally familiar results. As Romanticism defined the reactionary materialism of the Naturalists, so the Puritan ethic informs the adolescent taboo-fetish of this goat's prose. Alas, false lubricity grates as offensively as false diffidence; not to imply, however, that the narrator does not legitimately love vaginas. Indeed, had he rid himself entirely of the dull ideas he entertains for the abysmal final third of this novel, the resulting paean to hedon pleasure may have achieved true art merit. However, it's all too drab to be vivid and too rank to be hieratic. The author, like his narrator, seems to mistake a Titan for a Turk; a Titan, after all, cons the gods, not the banal bohemians of a derelict race.
(incidentally: does it invariably indicate a feeble imagination when one isolates Stavrogin as Dostoevsky's sublime ego-creation?)"
"So, I was glancing through some of the reviews here and noticed that someone has totally disparaged this book because its "hero" is immoral. It always bewilders me when people judge a book according to the moral judgment that they pass on its characters. Like when I was looking at the reviews of John Updike's Run, Rabbit and saw a woman saying that she hated the book because Angstrom left his wife twice in the book. I was like, don't take it personally, lady; he's not your husband. A lot of people do it. They ignore the book and get too tangled up in how likeable the characters are. I really don't get this. Someone should explain it to me. Is Lolita a bad book because it's about a pedophile? Should writers feel like their characters will be competing in a popularity contest in the minds of the readers? Should we then only read books about angels floating happily in Heaven, doing good things? Aren't evil and immorality - whatever they mean - facts of life that should be dissected and explained by literature?
I didn't bother with the morality of the hero. I don't care if he slept with a whore and then stole her money and ran away. Who cares? Look at all that delicious writing instead, all the ranting and raving of a tormented and brilliant mind, and the brutal honesty of it.
I don't know why publishers still insist on marketing this book for its "explicit language and breaking of sexual taboos in literature." That's just so passé in an age when even pornography makes us yawn. The beauty of this book lies somewhere else."
"I got through the first 150 pages before I decided that life is too short to waste time reading books you hate. Maybe I'm not smart enough or deep enough to appreciate a book like Tropic of Cancer, but for me each page was a tedious struggle. The author of the book's introduction boldy asserts that Henry Miller is "the greatest living author" (obviously, the edition I read was published prior to Miller's death in 1980), but I found Miller's frenetic, meandering style tiresome.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not one to carelessly fling aside any book that doesn't capture my attention in the first 100 pages. Once I start a book, it's difficult for me to give it up, mostly because it makes me feel like a quitter; but I found myself getting angry as I grudgingly plodded through this one. I kept thinking, "Henry, for chrissakes, give me something, ANYTHING to latch onto here!" That's when I decided it was time to give up. Some semblance of a plot might have helped keep my interest piqued, but I don't think that storytelling was the author's aim. The long and short of it is - these kinds of books are not my cup of tea."
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