THE LAST SAMURAI

New York City, NY: Hyperion/Talk/Miramax, 2000. First Edition. First Printing.. Hardcover. Fine/Fine Dust Jacket.. New York City, NY: Hyperion/Talk/Miramax, 2000. Hardcover. Fine/Fine. First Edition/First Printing. 530 pages. The author's breakthrough debut novel. Regarded by many critics and serious readers as the greatest American novel of the first decade of the 21st century. The true First Edition. Precedes and should not be confused with all other subsequent editions, particularly the British Edition. Published in a small and limited first print run as a hardcover original only that sold out shortly after publication. The First Edition is now rare. Presents Helen DeWitt's "The Last Samurai". Her tour-de-force masterpiece, unsurpassed by her, and perhaps unsurpassable, a West-Meets-East, one-of-a-kind achievement. "The pleasure of ideas, the rich varieties of human thought, the possibilities that life offers us, and the balance between the structures we make of the world and the chaos that it proffers in return: Stylistically, the novel mirrors these ambivalences. DeWitt's remarkable prose follows the shifts and breaks of human consciousness and memory, capturing the intrusions of unspoken thought that punctuate conversation while providing tantalizing disquisitions on Japanese grammar or the physics of aerodynamics. Remarkable, profound, and often very funny. Arigato DeWitt-sensei" (Burhan Tufail). The title is DeWitt's homage to her protagonists' obsession with Akira Kurosawa's "The Seven Samurai", ranked at the end of 2010 by film critics worldwide as the greatest "foreign" film of all time. As DeWitt herself would have observed, "foreign" as opposed to what? Hollywood films? If so, there is no competition to speak of. An absolute "must-have" title for Helen DeWitt collectors. This title is a great book. This is one of few copies of the First Hardcover Edition/First Printing still available online and is in especially fine condition: Clean, crisp, and bright. Please note: Precedes and should NOT be confused with all other subsequent editions, particularly the British Edition. Talk/Miramax, the publishing arm of Miramax Films, collapsed shortly after it was launched. Beset with other priorities (its failed magazine) and internal problems, it failed to undertake a necessary publicity tour for its stunning book coup - and its Berlin-based author. Very few copies were actually printed, making the First Edition hard to find in any condition. Copies available online have serious flaws or are in innumerable subsequent printings from another publisher, New Directions. This is surely an accessible and lovely alternative. A rare copy thus. One of the most brilliant writers of our time. A fine collectible copy. (SEE ALSO OTHER HELEN DEWITT TITLES IN OUR CATALOG). ISBN 0786866683.