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Monkey House Books is a mail order, used book dealer located on Long Island.

We offer quality used books and ephemera at reasonable prices through marketplaces like AbeBooks.com and Biblio.com.

09/28/2026

“Once I thought to write a history of the immigrants in America. Then I discovered that the immigrants were America.”

Historian Oscar Handlin was born in 1915 in New York City to Russian-Jewish immigrant parents, who instilled in him a love of literature and intellectual pursuits as well as an appreciation for democracy and social justice. He attended Brooklyn College at age 15 and earned his PhD from Harvard in 1940. Handlin devoted his long career to social history, ethnic studies, and the immigrant experience. He was a history professor at Harvard for over 40 years, authored numerous books, and was involved with many scholarly organizations and centers for study. He died in 2011 at the age of 95.

Handlin’s magnum opus was The Uprooted: The Epic Story of the Great Migrations That Made the American People. First published in 1951, the book won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1952, laid the groundwork for the next generation of historians, and remains a classic in the field. Handlin presents a wide-ranging history of immigration, not just the statistics and facts but the shape and feel of the experience for the people themselves - their hopes and dreams as well as the hazards and disillusionments. He examines the impact of the immigrant experience on the people and the impact of the people on the nation they helped build.

09/24/2026

The Beautiful and Damned was F. Scott Fitzgerald’s second novel, published in 1921, between the early success of This Side of Paradise in 1920 and his 1925 masterpiece, The Great Gatsby. Again Fitzgerald proved one of the most gifted writers of his generation and the peerless chronicler of Jazz Age New York.

Anthony Patch, an Ivy League-educated aspiring writer, and his beautiful young wife Gloria are “jazz-mad nuts” living an extravagant and hedonistic lifestyle of endless parties in the glittering atmosphere of New York and the resorts of Europe in the Roaring 20s. But this is a cautionary tale of reckless ambition and squandered talent, and no matter how beautifully Fitzgerald depicts the excitement of the Jazz Age, The Beautiful and Damned is also a timeless tragedy of misspent youth and the intractable realities of adulthood. Sadly, the best of Fitzgerald’s works were lived as well as written.

08/27/2026

Theodore Dreiser, born in 1871, was a prolific American novelist, member of the Chicago Group of Midwestern writers, and principal exponent of American Naturalism. Much of his work deals with the individual’s struggles with the demands of society, and his early career as a newspaperman honed his skills for meticulous detail and detached narratives. Contemporary reviews called him the “Grand Old Man of Realism,” “the principal American novelist in practice to-day,” and “a sort of a poet and a sort of a grizzly bear.”

An American Tragedy, published in 1925, is widely considered Dreiser’s finest work. Based on the 1906 case of Chester Gillette and Grace Brown, the story is genuine, vivid, gruesome, and unforgettable, even in an age when dozens of true crime shows are available with a click. It is a tale of seduction (both s*x and money) and the tragic consequences of cowardice and misplaced ambition. The novel is intensely American yet “moves with the inevitableness of a Greek tragedy,” as one of Dreiser’s contemporaries wrote. Even after 100 years, this important brick of a book is absorbing from start to finish.

08/14/2026

English writer John Galsworthy was born in 1867. His magnum opus is The Forsyte Saga, a collection of novels written over more than 20 years beginning with The Man of Property in 1906. The series offers a rich portrait of a large and successful family in Britain’s industrial class, exploring their personal lives as well as their financial and social achievements over 40+ years. The first trilogy focuses on Soames Forsyte (the titular man of property, aloof & possessive), his sensitive and artistic cousin Jolyon, and Soames’ wife Irene (and her resistance to being just a piece of Soames’ property). The trilogy continues with In Chancery (1920) and To Let (1921), and we are introduced to Soames’ daughter Fleur and Jolyon’s son Jon. There are two further trilogies concerning the younger generation, as well as other stories and interludes involving some of the Forsyte characters.

There were several early films of Forsyte novels, a television series of the saga was created for the BBC in 1967, and there is a 2026 production offering a modern reimagining of Galsworthy’s work. My personal favorite, however, is still the 2002-2003 miniseries on PBS Masterpiece starring the brilliant Damian Lewis, Gina McKee, and Rupert Graves.

08/01/2026

For fans of Nathaniel Hawthorne, there’s no place better to visit than . The House of the Seven Gables, Hawthorne’s birthplace, and the Custom House where he worked are all historic sites to visit, but there are also several private residences around town associated with Hawthorne or his wife, Sophia Peabody. 12 Herbert Street was the home of Hawthorne’s mother’s family, the Mannings, and where he spent many years as a child and young man. The Grimshawe house near the Charter Street Cemetery was home to Sophia Peabody’s family (including her brilliant and accomplished sisters). 18 Chestnut Street in the gorgeous McIntyre District is where Sophia & Nathaniel lived briefly in the 1840s and where son Julian was born. And 14 Mall Street north of Salem Common is where Hawthorne wrote his masterpiece, The Scarlet Letter.

07/28/2026

Thomas Cromwell: The Rise & Fall of Henry VIII’s Most Notorious Minister by Robert Hutchinson (Thomas Dunne Books, 2009) brings 16th-century England to vivid life in this masterful biography of the brewer’s son who rose from obscurity to become the top religious adviser to King Henry VIII.

Taken on by Cardinal Wolsey in 1524 to survey the smaller monasteries, Cromwell began his meteoric rise after Wolsey fell from favor. Through a combination of bribery, theft, political maneuvering, and force of personality, over the course of fewer than ten years Cromwell’s resume included privy councilor, master of the jewels, Chancellor of the Exchequer, king’s secretary, Keeper of the Privy Seal, Vice Regent & High Chamberlain, and finally Earl of Ess*x in 1540, shortly before his downfall.

Cromwell was responsible for urging Henry to proclaim himself head of the Church of England in 1534, engineering the ex*****on of Anne Boleyn in 1536, and orchestrating the seizure of the monasteries from 1536-39, all of which had a profound and lasting impact on English history and culture.

Cromwell and the king ultimately fell out over the arrangement of Henry’s marriage to Anne of Cleves, and Cromwell was tried and convicted of treason and executed July 28, 1540. He was beheaded outside the Tower of London, and his boiled head was mounted on a spike above London Bridge.

07/16/2026

I confess I’m not really into jewelry - I don’t wear it and don’t know much about it - but I’ve always been a sucker for the intricate cat-and-mouse of a clever robbery and great detective work.
The Great Pearl Heist by Molly Caldwell Crosby tells the fascinating tale of the theft of a string of pale pink pearls in July 1913. Worth more than the Hope Diamond, the 61-pearl strand had been purchased by a dealer at auction in Paris and shipped to London - but somewhere in transit, the necklace disappeared, swapped for lumps of sugar. Thus began a landmark Scotland Yard investigation that pitted Detective Inspector Alfred Ward against Joseph Grizzard, aka the ‘King of Fences’, and his aptly named collaborator, jeweler and burglar James Lockett.
Based on Scotland Yard’s case files, archival newspaper accounts, and thieves’ memoirs, and with the backdrop of Edwardian London (think the Titanic and Downton Abbey), Crosby’s story becomes much more than just a few lost baubles.

06/10/2026

June 10 is the birthday of Saul Bellow, 1915-2005, one of the great novelists of the post-war period in American literature. The Canadian-born American writer was the son of Russian-Jewish parents and grew up in Montreal and Chicago. His first two novels were published in the late 1940s, and his work ushered in a new style combining Jewish traditions with a sense of “moral and social alarm.” His anti-heroes face existential dilemmas and moral crises, struggling to maintain a sense of individual dignity in the face of life’s circumstances and impediments.

Bellow received the National Book Award for three of his novels - The Adventures of Augie March (1954), Herzog (1965), and Mr. Sammler’s Planet (1971) - and he is still the only writer to have done so. His other works include Seize the Day and Henderson the Rain King, and Bellow was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1976.

Pictured here is the Penguin Classics edition of Humboldt’s Gift, one of Bellow’s most important works and recipient of the Pulitzer Prize in 1975. The novel was partly inspired by the tragic life and death of friend and poet Delmore Schwartz. This edition includes an introduction by Jeffrey Eugenides, author of Middles*x and himself a Pulitzer Prize winner.

06/02/2026

Today is the birthday of English author Thomas Hardy, 1840-1928, whose works offer a portrait of rural life in a modernizing world. Hardy was born in Dorsetshire, which became the Wess*x of many of his novels. His father was a stonemason, and Thomas was apprenticed to an architect, but he read widely in literature, science, and philosophy. His early poems went unpublished, and he offered his first 2 novels anonymously.

The success of Far From the Madding Crowd in 1874 enabled him to pursue a literary career in earnest, and he wrote more than a dozen novels over the next 24 years, as well as 8 volumes of poetry later in life. His works include such classics as Return of the Native, Jude the Obscure, and Tess of the D’Urbervilles. Hardy’s tales are deterministic and naturalistic, with the natural world almost a character in itself. But there is no idyllic, simple life in Hardy’s rural settings; instead, his protagonists often struggle against their environments and their fates with an almost tragic intensity.

Pictured here are vintage paperback editions of The Trumpet-Major, a love story set during the Napoleonic Wars; and Return of the Native, the sad tale of Clym Yeobright and his life on Egdon Heath.

05/20/2026

Memorial Day is the traditional start of summer on Long Island, and like many area beaches, it’s opening weekend for Jones Beach State Park. With 6.5 miles of beachfront and easy access from New York City and all of Long Island, it’s possibly the most popular beach on the East Coast, welcoming 9.5 million visitors in 2024.

Work on Jones Beach began in the 1920s with a massive dredging operation and the planting of acres of beach grass to stabilize the dunes. The park opened on August 4, 1929, and quickly became a beloved destination for residents of the New York metropolitan area. From the iconic 188’ Italianate water tower to the stylish Art Deco bathhouses, many of the original buildings and amenities are still in use today. The park also boasts an amphitheater, boardwalk, restaurants, and playgrounds, making for the perfect getaway on a hot summer day.

Pictured here is Jones Beach: An Illustrated History by John Hane (2007), a nostalgic look back at this quintessential New York icon.

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Miller Place, NY
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