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Books : Literature & Fiction : Authors, A-Z : ( T ) : Theroux, Paul
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First published more than thirty years ago, Paul Theroux's strange, unique, and hugely entertaining railway odyssey has become a modern classic of travel literature. Here Theroux recounts his early adventures on an unusual grand continental tour. Asia's fabled trains -- the Orient Express, the Khyber Pass Local, the Frontier Mail, the Golden Arrow to Kuala Lumpur, the Mandalay Express, the Trans-Siberian Express -- are the stars of a journey that takes him on a loop eastbound from London's Victoria Station to Tokyo Central, then back from Japan on the Trans-Siberian. Brimming with Theroux's signature humor and wry observations, this engrossing chronicle is essential reading for both the ardent adventurer and the armchair traveler.
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Paul Theroux: Dog Days (30 min)
It was a time of excessive heat, unwholesome influences – and an overpowering lust for the Chinese servant girl.
Theroux is a novelist, short story and travel writer. His more than two dozen books include Riding the Iron Rooster and Mosquito Coast.
DOG DAYS, by Paul Theroux, originally appeared in Playboy Magazine (November, 1971) ©1971 Playboy.
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.: Fortitude (30 min)
She was a lovely old lady – at least what was left of her – and she had the best set of sweetbreads that money could buy.
Vonnegut is the bestselling author of many works, including Slaughterhouse Five, Breakfast of Champions and, most recently, Hocus Pocus.
FORTITUDE, by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., originally appeared in Playboy Magazine (September, 1968) ©1968 Playboy.
Ursula K. Le Guin: Unlocking the Air (28 min)
This is history. Soldiers stand in a row before the palace, their muskets ready. Stefana is ready too.
Le Guin is best known for her fantasy and science fiction, including The Left Hand of Darkness and the Earthsea trilogy, but she has also published poetry, plays, and several children's books.
UNLOCKING THE AIR, by Ursula K. Le Guin, originally appeared in Playboy Magazine (December, 1990) ©1990 Playboy.
Lawrence Sanders: The Further Adventures of Chauncey Alcock (32 min)
In which our hero is called upon to exhibit his manhood and does so courageously, to the gratification of new friends and the heartfelt approbation of fellow citizens.
Sanders is the author of many bestselling thrillers, including the Deadly Sin series (The First Deadly Sin...) and the Commandment series (The Third Commandment...).
THE FURTHER ADVENTURES OF CHAUNCEY ALCOCK, by Lawrence Sanders, originally appeared in Playboy Magazine (December, 1972) ©1972 Playboy.
Andre Dubus: Anna (56 min)
They knocked off the drugstore because they thought that money would change their lives. It did – but not enough.
Dubus taught for eighteen years at Bradford College in Massachusetts before an automobile accident forced his retirement. Many of his short stories are set in that area.
ANNA, by Andre Dubus, originally appeared in Playboy Magazine (June, 1981) ©1981 Playboy.
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Starting with a rush-hour subway ride to South Station in Boston to catch Amtrak's Lake Shore Limited to Chicago, Theroux takes readers on a train journey from New England to Patagonia in southernmost Argentina.
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A master of the travel narrative weaves three intertwined novellas of Westerners transformed by their sojourns in India.
This startling, far-reaching book captures 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 woe or truth or peace. A middle-aged couple on vacation veers heedlessly from idyll to chaos. A buttoned-up Boston lawyer finds succor in Mumbai's reeking slums. And a young woman befriends an elephant in Bangalore.
We also meet Indian characters as singular as they are reflective of the country's subtle ironies: an executive who yearns to become a holy beggar, an earnest young striver whose personality is rewired by acquiring an American accent, a miracle-working guru, and others.
As ever, Theroux's portraits of people and places explode stereotypes to exhilarating effect. The Elephanta Suite urges us toward a fresh, compelling, and often inspiring notion of what India is, and what it can do to those who try to lose--or find--themselves there.
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A master of the travel narrative gives us three intertwined novellas of Westerners transformed by their sojourns in India.
This startling and satisfying book captures the tumult, ambition, hardship, and serenity that mark today’s India. Paul Theroux’s characters risk venturing far beyond the subcontinent’s well-worn paths to discover woe or truth or peace. A middle-aged couple on vacation veers heedlessly from idyll to chaos. A buttoned-up Boston lawyer finds succour in Mumbai’s reeking slums. And a young woman befriends an elephant in Bangalore.
In these pages, we also meet Indian characters as singular as they are indicative of the country’s subtle ironies: an executive who yearns to become a holy beggar, an earnest young striver whose personality is rewired by acquiring an American accent, a miracle-working guru, and more.
As ever, Theroux’s portraits of people and places explode stereotypes to exhilarating effect. The Elephanta Suite urges us toward a fresh, compelling, and often inspiring notion of what India is, and what it can do to those who try to lose — or find — themselves there.
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"Possibly his best travel book...an observant and frequently hilarious account of a trip that took him to 51 Pacific Islands."
TIME
Renowned travel writer and novelist Paul Theroux has been many places in his life and tried almost everything. But this trip in and around the lands of the Pacific may be his boldest, most fascinating yet. From New Zealand's rain forests, to crocodile-infested New Guinea, over isolated atolls, through dirty harbors, daring weather and coastlines, he travels by Kayak wherever the winds take him--and what he discovers is the world to explore and try to understand.
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In a breathtaking adventure story, the paranoid and brilliant inventor Allie Fox takes his family to live in the Honduran jungle, determined to build a civilization better than the one they've left. Fleeing from an America he sees as mired in materialism and conformity, he hopes to rediscover a purer life. But his utopian experiment takes a dark turn when his obsessions lead the family toward unimaginable danger.
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The Secret Agent (1907) builds a triangle of conspiracy, which is destroyed, by the self-interset of its participants. Mr Verloc, employed by a foreign embassy to incriminate an anarchist group, instead destroys his family, his illusions, and his own life, in a terrorist act gone utterly wrong. Conrad's ironic and troubling novel exposes the futility of political extremism and the strength,and vanity of human illusion.
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Paul Theroux, the author of the train travel classics The Great Railway Bazaar and The Old Patagonian Express, takes to the rails once again in this account of his epic journey through China. He hops aboard as part of a tour group in London and sets out for China's border. He then spends a year traversing the country, where he pieces together a fascinating snapshot of a unique moment in history. From the barren deserts of Xinjiang to the ice forests of Manchuria, from the dense metropolises of Shanghai, Beijing, and Canton to the dry hills of Tibet, Theroux offers an unforgettable portrait of a magnificent land and an extraordinary people.
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Paul Theroux invites you to join him on the journey of a lifetime, in the grand romanttic tradition, by train across Euope, through the vast underbelly of Asia and in the heart of Russia, and then up to China. Here is China by rail, as seen and heard through the eyes and ears of one of the most intrepid and insightful travel writers of our time.
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Caught in the crossfire of her parents' acrimonious divorce, witness to their battles, intrigues and affairs, neglected and exploited, Maisie is a child who knows too much about the world of adults. Despite it all, Maisie maintains her goodness and dignity in the face of the bitterness and profligacy that surround her. Also included is The Pupil, a short story centering on the experiences of a child in a dishonorable and uncaring family.
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In this unique and hugely entertaining railway odyssey, Theroux vividly recounts his travels--and the people, places, and landscapes he encountered--on the Orient Express, the Khyber Mail, and the Trans-Siberian Express, through such countries as Turkey, Iran, India, Southeast Asia, Japan, and the Soviet Union.
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"Travel writing at its best."
THE HOUSTON POST
Author and travel writer Paul Theroux does what no one else can: he travels to the isolated, unusual, and fascinating spots of the world, and creates an elegy to them that makes readers feel they are traveling with him. Evocative, breathtaking, intriguing, here is the armchair traveler's guide to the sites of the world he makes us feel we know.
From the Paperback edition.
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His mind crowded with vivid images of Africa, Graham Greene set off in 1935 to discover Liberia, a remote and unfamiliar republic founded for released slaves. Now with a new introduction by Paul Theroux, Journey Without Maps is the spellbinding record of Greene’s journey. Crossing the red-clay terrain from Sierra Leone to the coast of Grand Bassa with a chain of porters, he came to know one of the few areas of Africa untouched by colonization. Western civilization had not yet impinged on either the human psyche or the social structure, and neither poverty, disease, nor hunger seemed able to quell the native spirit. BACKCOVER: “One of the best travel books [of the twentieth] century.”
—Norman Sherry
“Journey Without Maps and The Lawless Roads reveal Greene’s ravening spiritual hunger, a desperate need to touch rock bottom within the self and in the humanly created world.”
—The Times Higher Education Supplement
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Welcome to the Hotel Honolulu, a down-at-the-heels tourist place that's two blocks from the beach on a back street in Waikiki, where middle America stays and dreams.
Like the Canterbury pilgrims, every guest in this eighty-room hotel has come in search of something — sun, love, happiness, unnamable longing — and everyone has a story. Honeymooners, vacationers, wanderers, mythomaniacs, soldiers, and families all land at the Hotel Honolulu. But the hotel is as suited to being a crime scene as a love nest. Fortunately, our keen-eyed narrator, a writer down on his luck, is there to relate all the comings and goings. He's lost money, friends, house, and family, and he has no experience running a hotel. But all that doesn't stop Buddy, the bloated, boozy hotel owner — the last of a dying breed — from signing him on as manager. It isn't long before the hotel expands to encompass the narrator's whole world. His original plan of escape from a life of the mind becomes something altogether different: a way to return to the world he left, the world of imagined life.
No one but Paul Theroux could write this romp of a book, with its acutely drawn characters and canny insights into a place that is often viewed as a simple island paradise. In this unforgettable novel, Theroux shows us a funny, languid, louche floating world, island style. This is the essence of Hawaii as it has never been depicted, and it is also the heart of America.
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After eleven years as an American living in London, the renowned travel writer Paul Theroux set out to travel clockwise around the coast of Great Britain to find out what the British were really like. The result is this perceptive, hilarious record of the journey. Whether in Cornwall or Wales, Ulster or Scotland, the people he encountered along the way revealed far more of themselves than they perhaps intended to display to a stranger. Theroux captured their rich and varied conversational commentary with caustic wit and penetrating insight.