Showing results by author "Paul Theroux" in All Categories

The Great Railway Bazaar is Paul Theroux's account of his epic journey by rail through Asia. Filled with evocative names of legendary train routes - the Direct-Orient Express, the Khyber Pass Local, the Delhi Mail from Jaipur, the Golden Arrow to Kuala Lumpur, the Hikari Super Express to Kyoto, and the Trans-Siberian Express - it describes the many places, cultures, sights and sounds he experienced and the fascinating people he met.

Before George Orwell was Orwell - the pen name he took on becoming a writer - he was Eric Blair, an unlikely policeman in Burma. 19 years old, unusually tall, highly intelligent, a diffident loner fresh from Eton, Blair stood out amongst his fellow trainees in 1920s Mandalay. It was here, over five years in the narrow colonial world of the Raj - a decaying system steeped in overt racism and petty class-conflict - that Eric Blair became the George Orwell we know: an anti-imperialist, a socialist and a writer of rare commitment.

The Old Patagonian Express tells of Paul Theroux's train journey down the length of North and South America. Beginning on Boston's subway, he depicts a voyage from ice-bound Massachusetts to the arid plateau of Argentina's most southerly tip. Shivering and sweating by turns as the temperature and altitude rise and plummet, he describes the people he encountered - the tedious Mr Thornberry in Limón and reading to the legendary blind writer, Jorge Luis Borges, in Buenos Aires.

A final African adventure from the writer whose gimlet eye and effortless prose have brought the world to generations of readers. Journeying alone, in what he feels will be his last African journey, Paul Theroux encounters a world increasingly removed from both the itineraries of tourists and the hopes of post-colonial independence movements. Having travelled down the right-hand side of Africa in Dark Star Safari, he sets out this time from Cape Town, heading northwards up the left-hand side, through South Africa and Namibia, to Botswana, heading for the Congo, in search of the end of the line.

In Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, Paul Theroux retraces the steps he took thirty years ago in his classic The Great Railway Bazaar. From the Eurostar in London, he once again sets out on a journey to the East, travelling overland through Eastern Europe, India and Asia. Infused with the changes that have shaped the exterior landscape and enriched with developments to his own perceptions and psychology, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star is an absorbing and beautifully written follow-up to The Great Railway Bazaar.

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.

Nogales is a border town caught between Mexico and the United States of America. A 40-foot steel fence runs through its centre, separating the prosperous US side from the impoverished Mexican side. It is a fascinating site of tension, now more than ever, as the town fills with hopeful border crossers and the deportees who have been caught and brought back. And it is here that Paul Theroux will begin his journey into the culturally rich but troubled heart of modern Mexico.

Drawing together a fascinating body of writing from over 14 years of work, Figures in a Landscape ranges from profiles of cultural icons (Oliver Sacks, Elizabeth Taylor, Robin Williams) to intimate personal remembrances, from thrilling adventures in Africa to literary writings from Theroux's rich and expansive personal reading. Collectively these pieces offer a fascinating portrait of the author himself, his extraordinary life and his restless and ever-curious mind.

The stories in The Vanishing Point are both exotic and domestic, their settings ranging from Hawaii to Africa and New England. Each focuses on life’s vanishing points—a moment when seemingly all lines running through one’s life converge, and one can see no farther, yet must deal with the implications. With the insight, subtlety, and empathy that has long characterized his work, Theroux has written deeply moving stories about memory, longing, and the passing of time, reclaiming his status, once again, as a master of the form.

Allie Fox is going to re-create the world. Abominating the cops, crooks, junkies and scavengers of modern America, he abandons civilisation and takes the family to live in the Honduran jungle. There his tortured messianic genius keeps them alive, his hoarse tirades harrying them through a diseased and dirty Eden towards unimaginable darkness.

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.

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.

For the past 50 years, Paul Theroux has travelled to the far corners of the Earth - to China, Africa, the Pacific Islands, Russia, and elsewhere. In Deep South, he turns his gaze to a region much closer to his home. Travelling through North and South Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama and Arkansas, he writes of the stunning landscapes he discovers - the deserts, the mountains, the Mississippi - and, above all, the lives of the people he meets.

American-born Paul Theroux had lived in England for 11 years when he realized he'd explored dozens of exotic locations without discovering anything about his adopted home. So, with a knapsack on his back, he set out to explore by walking and by short train trips. The result is a witty, observant and often acerbic look at an ever eccentric assortments of Brits in all shapes and sizes.

There's sibling rivalry and then there's the relationship of brothers Cal and Frank Belanger, which takes fraternal antipathy to a whole new level. Enemies seemingly since childhood, the small town of Littleford, where they are nicknamed 'The Bad Angle Brothers', just isn't big enough to hold them both. So Cal strikes out for the world's wild places—a gifted geologist in search of gold and other precious minerals, leaving Frank to develop a successful career as the town's lawyer, fixer and local hero.

Joe Sharkey knows he is passed his prime. Now in his 60s, the younger surfers around the breaks on the north shore of Oahu still revere him as the once-legendary 'Shark', but his sponsors have moved on and Joe wonders what new future awaits him on the horizon. Uninterrupted quality time with the ocean, he hopes. Life has other plans. When he accidentally hits and kills a man near Waimea while drunk-driving, he fears he will never rebound. Under the direction of his stubbornly loyal girlfriend Olive, he throws himself into uncovering his victim's story.

In Camp Echo, his novella for Scribd Originals, Theroux delivers a compelling coming-of-age story about racism, masculinity, morality, and leadership. Inspired by his own experiences as a Boy Scout in the early 1950s, Theroux writes with precision and vivid detail, drawing from his days as a teen in the wilderness battling his own definition of what it meant to be a man. His is a tale both classic and decidedly of this moment, when prejudice and intolerance are again on the rise.

It's 1960s America, and Herbie Gneiss is forced to leave college to get a job. Mr. Gibbon, a patriotic veteran of three wars, works with Herbie at Kant-Brake toy factory. When Herbie is drafted, Mr. Gibbon feels that he, too, should do something for his country; and so he decides to rob the Mount Holly Trust Company....

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.

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.