Search results for ""Author Paul Theroux""

'The Sheltering Sky is a book about people on the edge of an alien space; somewhere where, curiously, they are never alone' Michael Hoffman.Port and Kit Moresbury, a sophisticated American couple, are finding it more than a little difficult to live with each other. Endeavouring to escape this predicament, they set off for North Africa intending to travel through Algeria - uncertain of exactly where they are heading, but determined to leave the modern world behind. The results of this casually taken decision are both tragic and compelling.

Read more less

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY PAUL THEROUXSomerset Maugham's success as a writer enabled him to indulge his adventurous love of travel, and he recorded the sights and sounds of his wide-ranging journeys with an urbane, wry style all his own. The Gentleman in the Parlour is an account of the author's trip through what was then Burma and Siam, ending in Haiphong, Vietnam. Whether by river to Mandalay, on horse through the mountains and forests of the Shan States to Bangkok, or onwards by sea, Maugham's vivid descriptions bring a lost world to life.

Read more less

A celebration of the timeless act of reading - as seen through the lens of one of the world’s most beloved photographers Young or old, rich or poor, engaged in the sacred or the secular, people everywhere read. This homage to the beauty and seductiveness of reading brings together a collection of photographs taken by Steve McCurry over his nearly four decades of travel and is introduced by award-winning writer, Paul Theroux. McCurry’s mesmerizing images of the universal human act of reading are an acknowledgement of - and a tribute to - the overwhelming power of the written word.

Read more less

Award-winning documentary photographer Eli Reed’s “long walk” has been a journey that has taken him from a low-income housing project in Perth Amboy, New Jersey, to Harvard University and to membership in the elite international photojournalists’ collective, Magnum Photos. Reed’s quest to understand “what it means to be a human being” has given him an extraordinary empathy with the people he photographs, whether they are Lost Boys in Sudan, the poor in America, or actors in Hollywood. In a photographic career spanning five decades, Reed has been the recipient of a World Understanding Award from POYi (Pictures of the Year International), Lucie Award for Achievement in Documentary, World Press Award, Leica Medal of Excellence, Overseas Press Club Award, and a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard, as well as a runner-up for a Pulitzer Prize.Eli Reed: A Long Walk Home presents the first career retrospective of Reed’s work. Consisting of over 250 images that span the full range of his subjects and his evolution as a photographer, the photographs are a visual summation of the human condition. They include examples of Reed’s early work; a broad selection of images of people from New York to California that constitutes a brilliant collective portrait of the social, cultural, and economic experiences of Americans in our time; images of life and conflict in Africa, the Middle East, Haiti, Central America, England, Spain, South America, and China; portraits of women and Hollywood actors; and self-portraits. Reed’s artist statement and an introduction by Paul Theroux, whom Reed met while working in Africa, complete the volume.

Read more less

Unflinchingly honest about his family, his failures, his already broken health at the age of sixty?three and the loss of the hopes he once had for himself, Thomsen is also sickened by the corruption and rapacity of our societies, the inequality and the economic destitution. What starts as an almost reluctant concatenation of memory and poignant, limpid descriptions of Brazil, grows into a shattering romantic symphony on human misery and life s small but exquisite transcendent pleasures. He spares the reader nothing.

Read more less

Henry D. Thoreau traveled to the backwoods of Maine in 1846, 1853, and 1857. Originally published in 1864, and published now with a new introduction by Paul Theroux, this volume is a powerful telling of those journeys through a rugged and largely unspoiled land. It presents Thoreau's fullest account of the wilderness. The Maine Woods is classic Thoreau: a personal story of exterior and interior discoveries in a natural setting--all conveyed in taut, masterly prose. Thoreau's evocative renderings of the life of the primitive forest--its mountains, waterways, fauna, flora, and inhabitants--are timeless and valuable on their own. But his impassioned protest against the despoilment of nature in the name of commerce and sport, which even by the 1850s threatened to deprive Americans of the "tonic of wildness," makes The Maine Woods an especially vital book for our own time.

Read more less

Bali-based artist Ashley Bickerton (born 1959) rose to prominence in the early 1980s as part of New York’s East Village art scene with his vibrant abstract works critiquing consumer culture and the commodification of the art object. Alongside Jeff Koons, Meyer Vaisman and Peter Halley, Bickerton pioneered what was called the “Neo-Geo” movement with his unconventional paintings devoid of Expressionist brushstrokes. Featuring works that span the duration of Bickerton’s career thus far, from the earlier consumerist works up to the recent tropically colored mixed-media paintings of exotic, erotic fantasies and nightmares, Ashley Bickerton: Ornamental Hysteria draws from works in Damien Hirst’s Murderme collection. This fully illustrated book offers a thorough survey of the artist’s diverse body of work and includes essays by novelist Paul Theroux and art critic Nicola Trezzi, as well as a conversation between Bickerton and the filmmaker Roddy Bogawa.

Read more less

A classic of modern travel writing, An Area of Darkness is Nobel laureate V. S. Naipaul’s profound reckoning with his ancestral homeland.Part of the Macmillan Collector’s Library; a series of stunning, clothbound, pocket sized classics with gold foiled edges and ribbon markers. These beautiful books make perfect gifts or a treat for any book lover. This edition is introduced by internationally acclaimed author Paul Theroux.Traveling from the bureaucratic morass of Bombay to the ethereal beauty of Kashmir, from a sacred ice cave in the Himalayas to an abandoned temple near Madras, Naipaul encounters a dizzying cross-section of humanity: browbeaten government workers and imperious servants, a suavely self-serving holy man and a deluded American religious seeker. An Area of Darkness also abounds with Naipaul’s strikingly original responses to India’s paralyzing caste system, its acceptance of poverty and squalor, and the conflict between its desire for self-determination and its nostalgia for the British raj. This may be the most elegant and passionate book ever written about the subcontinent.

Read more less