I'm Dying Laughing: The Humourist

New York: Henry Holt & Co, 1987. First American Edition. Hardcover. Very Good/Very Good. 1st Printing Stated: First American Edition. In addition contains complete number line including number one. Hard cover in very good condition with light gray boards, black spine cloth, and pink gilt spine lettering. Interior text block clean & tight; no writing, no markings noted. Overall very light mellow age toning to the papers. Dust jacket in likewise very good condition; ghost of shelf & edge wear; age toning to the white of the jacket; not price clipped. * From the jacket flap, ""Published posthumously, this is the last work of fiction by the writer whom Nobel Laureate Patrick White called ""a novelist of genius."" A magnificent novel of betrayal and self-delusion, madness and consuming passions, ""I'm Dying Laughing"" spans three decades and two continents as it re-creates to chilling effect the political turbulence of the American Left and the clamor and menace of the McCarthy Right. And not since her classic ""The Man Who Loved Children"" has Christina Stead fashioned two such large and memorable characters as Emily Wilkes and Stephen Howard. Emily, writer of successful pop novels and film scripts, is a woman of enormous but mercurial enthusiasms and a voracious appetite for experience, whose unflagging ebullience masks a darkness that will lead to disaster. . . . Savage, tragic, and mordantly funny, ""I'm Dying Laughing"" is manifestly the work of one of our great writers.""