Paul Theroux
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"At age nineteen, young Eton graduate Eric Blair set sail for India, dreading the assignment ahead. Along with several other young conscripts, he would be trained for three years as a servant of the British Empire, overseeing the local policemen in Burma. Navigating the social, racial, and class politics of his fellow British at the same time as he learned the local languages and struggled to control his men would prove difficult enough. But doing...
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"Cal has always lived in the shadow of his brother, Frank, a complicated narcissist who was doted upon by their mother and beloved by the girls in their hometown-including Cal's own girlfriends. In an attempt to escape Frank's insidious presence, Cal pursues a different kind of freedom in the world's wild spaces, prospecting for gold and precious minerals everywhere from the heat of the desert at the Mexican border to the Alaskan chill to the suffocating...
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Pub. Date
2019
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"Legendary travel writer Paul Theroux fearlessly drives the entire length of the US-Mexico border, then goes deep into the hinterland, on the back roads of Chiapas and Oaxaca, to uncover the rich, layered world behind today's brutal headlines."--Provided by publisher.
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Allie Fox, the brilliant and paranoid inventor, takes his family to live in the Honduran jungle, determined to build a civilization better than the one they left. Fleeing from an America he sees as mired in materialism and conformity, he hopes to rediscover a purer life. His utopian experiment takes a dark turn when his obsessions lead his family towards unimaginable danger.
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Publisher
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Pub. Date
2014.
Description
"A dark and bitingly humorous collection of short stories from the "brilliantly evocative" (Time) Paul Theroux 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...
7) Mother Land
Author
Publisher
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Pub. Date
2017.
Description
Jay, one of seven living children, contemplates his mother's influence on the family and his life, as he struggles with her disappointment in him and suspects she may have sabotaged a budding relationship.
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The acclaimed author recounts his epic journey across Europe and Asia in this international bestselling classic of travel literature: “Compulsive reading” (Graham Greene).
In 1973, Paul Theroux embarked on a four-month journey by train from the United Kingdom through Europe, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. In The Great Railway Bazaar, he records in vivid detail and penetrating insight the many fascinating...
In 1973, Paul Theroux embarked on a four-month journey by train from the United Kingdom through Europe, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. In The Great Railway Bazaar, he records in vivid detail and penetrating insight the many fascinating...
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"[Hock] knows he is ensorcelled by exoticism, but he can't help himself. And, as things go from bad to worse and the pages start to turn faster, neither can we. A."—Entertainment Weekly
When he was a young man, Ellis Hock spent four of the best years of his life with the Peace Corps in Malawi. So when his wife of forty-two years leaves him, he decides to return to the village where he was stationed in search of the happiness...
When he was a young man, Ellis Hock spent four of the best years of his life with the Peace Corps in Malawi. So when his wife of forty-two years leaves him, he decides to return to the village where he was stationed in search of the happiness...
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Appears on list
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"One of the most acclaimed travel writers of our time turns his unflinching eye on an American South too often overlooked. Paul Theroux has spent fifty years crossing the globe, adventuring in the exotic, seeking the rich history and folklore of the far away. Now, for the first time, in his tenth travel book, Theroux explores a piece of America--the Deep South. He finds there a paradoxical place, full of incomparable music, unparalleled cuisine, and...
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Jerry Delfont receives a mysterious letter asking for his help regarding a dead boy. Before long, he finds himself lured into the company of the letter's author Merrill Unger, and is intrigued enough to pursue both the mystery and the woman. She introduces Delfont to a strange underworld where tantric sex and religious fervor lead to obsession, philanthropy and exploitation walk hand in hand, and, unless he can act in time, violence against the most...
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In this "candid, perceptive and intelligent" trio of novellas, the acclaimed travel writer presents tales of Westerners transformed by sojourns in India (Independent, UK).
These three intertwined novellas by the author of The Great Railway Bazaar capture the tumult, ambition, hardship, and serenity that mark today's India. Theroux's Westerners risk venturing far beyond the subcontinent's well-worn paths to discover truth, peace, or woe.
A middle-aged...
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In Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, Theroux recreates an epic journey he took thirty years ago, a giant loop by train (mostly) through Eastern Europe, Turkey, the Caucasus, Central Asia, the Indian Subcontinent, China, Japan, and Siberia. In short, he traverses all of Asia top to bottom, and end to end. In the three decades since he first travelled this route, Asia has undergone phenomenal change. The Soviet Union has collapsed, China has risen, India...
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Starting with a rush-hour subway ride to South Station in Boston to catch the Lake Shore Limited to Chicago, Theroux winds up on the poky, wandering Old Patagonian Express steam engine, which comes to a halt in a desolate land of cracked hills and thorn bushes. But with Theroux the view along the way is what matters: the monologuing Mr. Thornberry in Costa Rica, the bogus priest of Cali, and the blind Jorge Luis Borges, who delights in having Theroux...
18) My other life
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In the Washington Post Book World, Sven Birkerts called this exuberant novel "a complex and gripping work of invention and confession . . . I understood again how the prose of a true writer can bring us to a world beyond." The book spans almost thirty years in the life of a fictional "Paul Theroux," who moves through young bachelorhood in Africa, in and out of marriage, affairs, and employment, and between continents. It's a wry, worldly, erotic,
...19) Blinding light
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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 the cure for his writer's block. Amid a gang of thrill-seeking tourists, he finds his drug and his inspiration but is beset with an unnerving side effect—periodic...