Now a classic of the travel genre, The Great Railway Bazaarchronicles Paul Theroux's adventures by rail from Victoria Stationin London to Tokyo Central, told with his signature wryobservations.
From the author of "On The Road" comes this story of two menenganged in a passionate search for Dharma or truth. Their majoradventure is the pursuit of the Zen Way, which takes them climbinginto the high sierras to seek the lesson of solitude.
In 1959 Florence Green, a kindhearted widow with a smallinheritance, risks everything to open a bookshop - the onlybookshop - in the seaside town of Hardborough. By making a successof a business so impractical, she invites the hostility of thetown's less prosperous shopkeepers. By daring to enlarge herneighbors' lives, she crosses Mrs. Gamart, the local arts doyenne.Florence's warehouse leaks, her cellar seeps, and the shop isapparently haunted. Only too late does she begin to suspect thetruth: a town that lacks a bookshop isn't always a town that wantsone.
Gabriel Allon faces his most determined enemy-and greatestchallenge-in the stunning novel from the world-class practitionerof spy fiction.
"You see, even after all these years, I wonder if you reallyloved me."Vanessa and Virginia are sisters, best friends, bitterrivals, and artistic collaborators. As children, they fight for theattention of their overextended mother, their brilliant butdifficult father, and their adored brother, Thoby. As young women,they support each other through a series of devastating deaths,then emerge in bohemian Bloomsbury, bent on creating new lives andgroundbreaking works of art. Through everything--marriage, lovers,loss, madness, children, success and failure--the sisters remainthe closest of co-conspirators. But they also betray each other.Inthis lyrical, impressionistic account, written as a love letter andan elegy from Vanessa to Virginia, Sellers imagines her way intothe heart of the lifelong relationship between the writer VirginiaWoolf and the painter Vanessa Bell. With sensitivity and fidelityto what is known of both lives, Sellers has created a powerfulportrait of sibling rivalry.
Drawing from decades of work, travel, and research in Russia,Robert Alexander re-creates the tragic, perennially fascinatingstory of the final days of Russian monarchs Nicholas and Alexandraas seen through the eyes of the Romanov's young kitchen boy,Leonka.
The author who "weaves a story like no one else" ("RockyMountain News") presents her dazzling trilogy of three women whoshared a home and a c childhood-but grew to fulfill their ownunique destinies. Includes the complete trilogy: "Daring to Dream"Amidst the grandeur of Templeton House, Margo, Kate, and Laura werebrought up like sisters. But it is Margo, the housekeeper'sdaughter, whose dreams first take her far away on a magnificentjourney full of risk and reward. "Holding the Dream" Kate knew shehad something her friends Margo and Laura could never have--ashrewd head for business. But now, faced with professionalimpropriety, Kate is forced to look deep within herself. "Findingthe Dream" Laura seemed to have it all. Beautiful and intelligent,there was nothing that could keep her from her dreams. Until fatetook away the man she thought she loved.
Carson McCullers--novelist, dramatist, poet--was at the peakof her powers as a writer of short fiction. Here are nineteenstories that explore her signature themes: wounded adolescence,loneliness in marriage, and the tragicomedy of life in the South.Here too are "The Member of the Wedding" and "The Ballad of the SadCafe," novellas that Tennessee Williams judged to be "assuredlyamong the masterpieces of our language." (A Mariner Reissue)
In Dark Star Safari the wittily observant and endearinglyirascible Paul Theroux takes readers the length of Africa byrattletrap bus, dugout canoe, cattle truck, armed convoy, ferry,and train. In the course of his epic and enlightening journey, heendures danger, delay, and dismaying circumstances. Gauging the state of affairs, he talks to Africans, aid workers,missionaries, and tourists. What results is an insightfulmeditation on the history, politics, and beauty of Africa and itspeople, and "a vivid portrayal of the secret sweetness, the hiddenvitality, and the long-patient hope that lies just beneath thesurface" (Rocky Mountain News). In a new post*, Therouxrecounts the dramatic events of a return to Africa to visitZimbabwe.
Many people among them Henry James) have considered Balzac tobe the greatest of all novelists. Eugenie Grandet, his spare,classical story of a girl whose life is blighted by her father'shysterical greed, goes a long way to justifying that opinion. Oneof the most magnificent of his tales of early nineteenth-centuryFrench provincial life, this novel is the work of a writer on whomnothing was lost, and who represents most fully the ability of thehuman animal to understand and illuminate its own condition. Translated By Ellen Marriage With An Introduction By Fredric R.Jameson Fredric R. Jameson is William A. Lane, Jr. Professor ofComparative Literature at Duke University in North Carolina. Hispublications include Sartre: The Origins of a Style, Signatures ofthe Visible, and Post-modernism, or, The Cultural Logic of LateCapitalism, with Aesthetics of the Geopolitical forthcoming. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
The hilarious and well-traveled Sloane Crosley, author of the New York Times bestseller I Was Told There’d Be Cake , helms this collection of the genre’s gems.
Beautiful Chiara is smitten by the brilliant but pennilessdoctor Salvatore. Desiring the unwilling Salvatore as a futurehusband, she engages in a series of comic attempts to land herobject of affection, only to create a greater chasm between thestar-crossed would-be lovers.
Kenneth Trachtenberg, the witty and eccentric narrator of"More Die of Heartbreak," has left his native Paris for theMidwest. He has come to be near his beloved uncle, theworld-renowned botanist Benn Crader, self-described aplantvisionary.a While his studies take him around the world, Benn, arestless spirit, has not been able to satisfy his longings afterhis first marriage and lives from affair to affair and from ablissto breakdown.a Imagining that a settled existence will end hisanguish, Benn ties the knot again, opening the door to a flood ofnew torments. As Kenneth grapples with his own problems involvinghis unusual lady-friend Treckie, the two men try to figure out whygifted and intelligent people invariably find themselves aknee-deepin the garbage of a personal life.a
This selection covers the full range of Kipling's shortstories throughout his career, with the subject matter ranging fromthe Indian to the occult and from animals to domestic comedy.
Peter Pan, the "boy who would not grow up," originally appearedas a baby living a magical life among birds and fairies in J.M.Barrie’s sequence of stories, Peter Pan in KensingtonGardens . His later role as flying boy hero was brought to thestage by Barrie in the beloved play Peter Pan , which openedin 1904 and became the novel Peter and Wendy in 1911. In anarrative filled with vivid characters, epic battles, pirates,fairies, and fantastic imagination, Peter Pan’s adventures capturethe spirit of childhood— and of rebellion against the role ofadulthood in conventional society. This edition includes the novel and the stories, as well as anintroduction by eminent scholar Jack Zipes. Looking at the manbehind Peter Pan and sifting through the psychologicalinterpretations that have engaged many a critic, Zipes explores thelarger cultural and literary contexts in which we should appreciateBarrie’s enduring creation and shows why Peter Pan is a worknot for children but for adults seeking to reconnect
Stephen W. Sears has delivered a masterwork in Gettysburg, hissingle-volume history of the Civil War's greatest campaign. Drawingon original source material, from soldiers' letters to the OfficialRecords of the war, Sears offers dramatic and informed accounts ofevery aspect of the campaign, from well-hewn portraits of thebattle's leaders to detailed analyses of their strategies andtactics. Sears depicts General Meade's remarkable performance inhis first week of army command and pinpoints General Lee'sresponsibility in the agonizing failure of the Confederate army.With characteristic style and insight, Sears brings the epic taleof the battle in Pennsylvania vividly to life.
Passionate and perceptive, the three short novels that make upBalzac's "History of the Thirteen" are concerned in part with theactivities of a rich, powerful, sinister and unscrupulous secretsociety in nineteenth-century France. While the deeds of "TheThirteen" remain frequently in the background, however, theindividual novels are concerned with exploring various forms ofdesire. A tragic love story, Ferragus depicts a marriage destroyedby suspicion, revelation and misunderstanding. The Duchess deLangeais explores the anguish that results when a society coquettetries to seduce a heroic ex-soldier, while "The Girl with theGolden Eyes" offers a frank consideration of desire and sexuality.Together, these works provide a firm and fascinating foundation forBalzac's many later portrayals of Parisian life in his greatnovel-cycle "The Human Comedy".
Tertuliano Maximo Afonso is a divorced, depressed historyteacher. To lift his spirits, a colleague suggests he rent acertain video. Tertuliano watches the film, unimpressed. But duringthe night, when he is awakened by noises in his apartment, he goesinto the living room to find that the VCR is replaying the video.He watches in astonishment as a man who looks exactly like him-or,more specifically, exactly like he did five years before,mustachioed and fuller in the face-appears on the screen. He sleepsbadly. Against his better judgment, Tertuliano decides to pursuehis double. As he roots out the man's identity, what begins as awhimsical story becomes a "wonderfully twisted meditation onidentity and individuality" (The Boston Globe). Saramago displayshis remarkable talent in this haunting tale of appearance versusreality.
