Showing results by author "Paul Theroux" in All Categories

Slade Steadman's lone opus, published twenty years ago, was Trespassing, a cult classic about his travels through dozens of countries without benefit of passport. With his soon-to-be-ex-girlfriend Ava in tow, Steadman sets out for Ecuador’s jungle in search of a rare hallucinogenic drug and...

Acclaimed, bestselling author and travel writer Paul Theroux turns his gaze to Canada in a sweeping, personal journey. For more than half a century, Paul Theroux has traveled the globe and chronicled its far corners with curiosity, wit, and an unflinching eye. With True North, his twelfth travel...

Brought to you by Penguin. Canada – ‘The true north strong and free’ in the words of its national anthem – is the subject of this exhilarating new travel book from Paul Theroux: both a journey into the past and a cross-country road trip in the present, at a pivotal point in Canada's...

En este libro pionero de 1979, Paul Theroux relata su periplo de seis meses por el continente americano en ferrocarril. La aventura comienza en un tren de cercanías de Boston y acaba cuando un viejo expreso llega a la ciudad de Esquel, en plena Patagonia argentina. Entremedias, el autor cruza México, se interna en América Central, visita Machu Picchu o se toma unos días de descanso en Buenos Aires en compañía de Jorge Luis Borges.

Jack Flowers knew he needed to shake things up when he jumped into the Straits of Malacca and hitched a ride to Singapore. Deftly identifying the fastest route to fame along the seedy port, Jack starts hiring girls out to lonely tourists, sailors, bachelors — anyone with some loose change and...

From the legendary American master Paul Theroux comes a brilliant new novel of chilling psychological depth, the tale of a younger brother whose lifelong rivalry with his older brother—a powerful lawyer with a pattern of gleefully vicious betrayals—culminates in the ultimate plan: murder...

Jilly Farina is 14. Her father is drunk on the day of the Barnstable County Fair, so she goes by herself, and that night her life is transformed. When she walks into a tent to see Millroy the Magician, his eyes lighten from brown to green and fasten upon her. He performs miracles before her spellbound eyes. He tells her that he will train her to be his assistant, and he will give her a sequined costume. But this is only the beginning. Millroy is a magician not just of mere conjuring but of true, baffling magic.

Everyone in Cape Cod thinks that Mother is a wonderful woman: pious, hardworking, frugal. Everyone except her husband and seven children. To them she is a selfish and petty tyrant, endlessly comparing her many living children to the one who died in childbirth, keeping a viselike hold on her offspring even as they try to escape into adulthood. Welcome to Mother Land: a suffocating kingdom of parental narcissism.

“Never a dull moment . . . Vivid and deft.” — New York Review of Books Maude Pratt is a legend, a photographer famous for her cutting-edge techniques and uncanny ability to strip away the masks of the world’s most recognizable celebrities and luminaries. Now in her seventies, Maude has...

Ellis Hock runs a menswear store in Massachusetts but still dreams of the four years he spent in Malawi. When his wife leaves him, he realises that there is only one place for him to go: back to Malawi, where he can be happy again.

An eclectic compendium of the finest short fiction of the last 150 years, featuring works by Paul Theroux, Joseph Conrad, James Ellroy, Ambrose Bierce, Charlotte Perkins Gillman, Aldous Huxley, Philip Roth, and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Part Two: 1979-1984 includes: The Orient Express; Rudyard Kipling; Railways of the Raj; Graham Greene's Traveling Companion; and Sunrise with Seamonsters.

Spanning almost thirty years, My Other Life traces the journey of a fictional Paul Theroux—from young bachelorhood in Africa to his travels between continents, from in and out of marriage through various affairs and multiple means of employment. From his early education at the knee of a highly eccentric uncle until his years as a fledgling novelist in London under the wing of the rapacious Lady Max, this writer of different guises eventually retreats alone to his hometown, where he finds the raw material to begin again.

When Jerry Delfont, a travel writer with writer’s block, receives a letter from an American philanthropist, Mrs Merrill Unger, with news of a scandal involving an Indian friend of her son's, he is sufficiently intrigued to pursue the story. Jerry is swiftly captivated by the beautiful, mysterious Mrs Unger, but the circumstances surrounding the scandal cause him to doubt the exact nature of her philanthropy.

Newly married and having recently taken over the management of a hotel in Honolulu, a former writer is drawn into the lives of his guests and the distinctive customs and rhythms of the distant island. As witness to the many contrasting chronicles of the hotel's characters, he ultimately returns to writing once again. The result is this novel in 80 distinct episodes, a Chaucerian sequence of strange pilgrims and islanders confronting each other and their fates in the rooms of the seedy hotel.

In this wickedly satiric romp, Paul Theroux captures the essence of Hawaii as it has never been depicted. The novel's narrator, a down-on-his-luck writer, escapes to Waikiki and soon finds himself the manager of the Hotel Honolulu, a low-rent establishment a few blocks off the beach...

This fabulous, far-reaching book breathtakingly captures the tumult, ambition, hardship and serenity that mark modern India. Theroux's characters risk venturing far beyond its well-worn paths to discover woe or truth or peace. A holidaying middle-aged couple veer heedlessly from idyll to chaos. A buttoned-up Boston lawyer finds relief in Mumbai's reeking slums. A young woman befriends an elephant in Bangalore.

A young American walks into Sicily's Palazzo d'Oro during the '60s. Penniless, but swaggering with youth and burgeoning artistic talent, he accepts a proposition to become the companion to a beautiful and beguiling aristocrat. Their affair—formal and restrained by day, torrid and passionate by night—leads him to a place where nothing, not even his lover, is what it seems. This novella and three other tales explore the underbelly of sexual desire and together make up one of Paul Theroux's most compelling works yet.

A family watches in horror as their patriarch transforms into the singing, wise-cracking lead of an old-timey minstrel show. A renowned art collector relishes publicly destroying his most valuable pieces. Two boys stand by helplessly as their father stages an all-consuming war on the raccoons living in the woods around their house. A young artist devotes himself to a wealthy, malicious gossip, knowing that it's just a matter of time before she turns on him.

Quintessential travel articles and thoughtful essays by the observant, witty and skeptical travel writer and novelist. Part One: 1964-1978 includes: "Winter in Africa"; "Leper Colony"; "V.S. Naipaul"; "Memories of Old Afghanistan"; "The Night Ferry to Paris"; and "A Circuit of Corsica".