Pages from a Cold Island Signed First Edition Reference

Pages from a Cold Island is Frederick Exley’s second “fictional memoir,” published by Random House in 1975, seven years after A Fan’s Notes. Where the first book was about football and failure, the second is nominally about Edmund Wilson — specifically about Exley’s attempt to visit the great critic at his upstate New York home on the day of Wilson’s funeral. But the book is really about fame, ambition, and the impossible pressure of following a cult classic with a worthy successor.

The Book

The structure is deliberately fragmented. Exley interweaves his account of the failed pilgrimage to Wilson’s funeral with digressions about his own literary ambitions, his drinking, his sexual adventures, and his increasingly strained relationship with the publishing world. The book was poorly received — critics who had admired A Fan’s Notes found the sequel shapeless and self-indulgent — and it sold even worse than its predecessor.

In retrospect, Pages from a Cold Island is more interesting than its reputation suggests. Its very formlessness is a response to the impossible task Exley faced: how to follow a book that was, essentially, about the impossibility of writing a book. The self-consciousness that powers the narrative — Exley writing about the difficulty of writing about Edmund Wilson while also writing about the difficulty of being Frederick Exley — anticipates the metafictional strategies of later American fiction.

First Edition Details

Publisher: Random House, New York Publication date: 1975

Signed Copy Market Values

• Signed first edition: $200–$600
• Inscribed copies: $300–$800
• Unsigned first edition: $50–$150

Signed copies are scarce but less sought after than A Fan’s Notes. For Exley completists, this is an important acquisition that documents the pressures of cult-classic followup.