The Miraculous Fish of Domingo Gonzales

New York: W.W. Norton & Company. Very Good in Very Good- dj. (c.1950). First Edition. Hardcover. (price-clipped) [moderately shelfworn, faint dampstain along right-hand edge of front cover (interior of book not affected), minor soiling to page edges; jacket shows some wear at edges and corners, slightly faded at spine, minor paper loss at spine ends, slight rubbing/soiling]. Satirical novel about a small Mexican fishing village which gets "civilized" (and corrupted) when an American buyer of shark livers comes to town to do business with Domingo Gonzales, "a notorious deadbeat who caught nothing but sharks." The author had previously written three novels (including the justly famous and elusive "Detour"), although this fact is curiously unmentioned in the jacket blurb, which emphasizes his extensive travels about (and two-year residence in) Mexico, while off-handedly noting that "he has done much free-lance writing for magazines and movies." (This is also the only one of his four novels to bear a photograph of its author on the jacket.) .