Penn Book Center
Penn Book Center
130 S. 34th Street
Philadelphia, PA 19104
Tel: 215-222-7600
Fax: 215-222-7610
Email Us

Store Hours

Gift Certificate
Home

Staff Picks

Course Order Form

Books by Local Professors

New and Noteworthy

School Tools

Store Info

Penn Author Interviews

Course Order Information

eBook Help
Subscribe to
Mailing List


Enter email address

 Search:
Shopping Cart
Indiebound logo
Advanced Search Browse Subjects Indie Next List Award Winners Indie Bestsellers My Account Help Log Out
Welcome  

Penn Book Center has been serving the needs of the academic community on the campus of the University of Pennsylvania since 1962.

If you would like to order a book that is not listed on these Web pages please E-mail us at info@PennBookCenter.com).

ATTENTION: If you are ordering Course Books please email or call us (215-222-7600) directly. Or you may send us a course order form via mail or email. Please do not place course book orders through the Website.

SELL YOUR TEXTBOOKS FOR CASH AT PENN BOOK CENTER!

We will pay you CASH for all types of textbooks / course books.

  • We buy current editions and some older editions as well (regardless of where they were purchased).

  • Friendly service and no long lines!

How are buyback prices determined?

  • We buy back titles based on local and national supply and demand.

  • Titles reused for Penn Courses will receive higher buyback prices.

  • Our prices are competitive with other bookstores: compare before you sell!

Books by Local Professors  
Here are new titles by professors at Penn and Drexel. Please let us know if you have an upcoming release. (Read More!)

Frantic Panoramas: American Literature and Mass Culture, 1870-1920 Frantic Panoramas: American Literature and Mass Culture, 1870-1920
by Bentley, Nancy
Late nineteenth-century America saw an explosion in mass culture - from sensationalist tabloid newspapers to amusement parks to Wild West shows. Historians and critics have traditionally observed the advent of mass culture as undermining literature's central role in the public sphere. Literary writers of the time either reacted with a public show of disdain or retreated to conduct their own private experiments in style and form. In Frantic Panoramas, Nancy Bentley questions these traditional narratives of the opposition between literary culture and mass culture. For literary writers, Bentley explains, the confrontation with mass culture was less a retreat than a transformation, an ordeal through which habits of contemplative appreciation could be refashioned into new forms of critical thought. By grappling with the energies that marked mass culture, authors came to recognize kinds of human experience that were only now becoming visible as public. William Dean Howells shaped the plots of his novels around tabloid events like rail and trolley accidents and the public chaos of apartment house fires. Although Henry James was distressed at the way dime fiction had changed the very definition of literature, his meditations on mass culture led him to reimagine the novel as a collective "workshop" in which authors and readers jointly discovered new meaning. Bentley conducts close readings of these and other writers such as Edith Wharton, James Weldon Johnson, Pauline Hopkins, and Gertrude Bonnin to demonstrate how leading artists drew upon commercial culture to create new and distinct literary forms. Drawing on original archival research and a historically grounded theory of realism, Frantic Panoramas is an innovative and comprehensive study of how the emergence of mass culture affected literary culture in America.
Nancy Bentley is Associate Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania.

New and Noteworthy  
New titles worth a look. (Read More!)

Blank Spots on the Map: The Dark Geography of the Pentagon's Secret World Blank Spots on the Map: The Dark Geography of the Pentagon's Secret World
by Paglen, Trevor
Blank Spots on the Map is an expose of an empire that continues to grow every year and which, officially, it isn't even there. It is the adventurous, insightful, and often chilling story of a young geographer's road trip through the underworld of U.S. military and C.I.A. "black ops" sites. This is a shadow nation of state secrets: clandestine military bases, ultra-secret black sites, classified factories, hidden laboratories, and top-secret agencies making up what defense and intelligence insiders themselves call the "black world." Run by an amorphous group of government agencies and private companies, this empire's ever expanding budget dwarfs that of many good sized countries, yet it denies its own existence.
Author Trevor Paglen is a scholar in geography, an artist, and a provocateur. His research into areas that officially don't exist leads him on a globe-trotting investigation into a vast, undemocratic, and uncontrolled black empire - the unmarked blank areas whether you are looking at Google Earth or a U.S. Geological Survey map. Paglen knocks on the doors of CIA prisons, stakes out the Groom Lake covert air base in Nevada from a mountaintop 30 miles away, observes classified spacecraft in the night sky with amateur astronomers, and dissects the Defense Department's multibillion dollar black budget. Traveling to the Middle East, Central America, and even around our nation's capital and its surrounding suburbs, he interviews the people who live on the edges of these blank spots. Whether Paglen reports from a hotel room in Vegas, Washington D. C. suburbs, secret prisons in Kabul, buried CIA aircraft in Honduras, or a trailer in Shoshone Indian territory, he is impassioned, rigorous, relentless, and eye-opening. This is a human, vivid, and telling portrait of a ballooning national mistake.

Course Order Information  
If you wish to order course books please e-mail us at info@PennBookCenter.com. Please include course number, anticipated enrollment, and semester information. (Read More!)


Quote of the Day

"Always read stuff that will make you look good if you die in the middle of the night."

- attributed to P. J. O'Rourke

From The Quotable Book Lover (Lyons Press)


Author Birthday

Franz Kafka was born today in 1883.


Penn Author Interviews

What Penn authors are writing and reading (Read More!)




Indie Next List

Unique and provocative selections from a great diversity of voices...all personally recommended by the independent booksellers of America. (Read More!)

Sag Harbor
by Whitehead, Colson
i have just now finished sag harbor. it's a masterpiece. he wrote the hell out of it. i knew he could write, of course i knew he could write, but this is above and beyond. is he the greatest of his generation? possibly. if this book does not make him enduringly and hugely famous, i may want to get out of books altogether.--Sarah McNally, McNally Jackson Books (New York, NY)



Security & Privacy Copyright