Popular books

Paul Theroux

The Old Patagonian Express: By Train Through the Americas

<p>The Old Patagonian Express</p><

Barbara Siegel

Tanis the shadow years

Preludes 2

Paul Theroux

The Pillars of Hercules

<p>"DAZZLING".</p><p>— Time</p><p>"[THEROUX'S] WORK IS DISTINGUISHED BY A SPLENDID EYE FOR DETAIL AND THE TELLING GESTURE; a storyteller's sense of pacing and gift for granting closure to the most subtle progression of events; and the graceful use of language. . We are delighted, along with Theroux, by the politeness of the Turks, amazed by the mountainous highlands in Syria, touched by the gesture of an Albanian waitress who will not let him pay for his modest meal. . The Pillars of Hercules [is] engrossing and enlightening from start (a damning account of tourists annoying the apes of Gibraltar) to finish (an utterly captivating visit with Paul Bowles in Tangier, worth the price of the book all by itself)".</p><p>— Chicago Tribune</p><p>"ENTERTAINING READING. . WHEN YOU READ THEROUX, YOU'RE TRULY ON A TRIP".</p><p>— The Boston Sunday Globe</p><p>"HIS PICARESQUE NARRATIVE IS STUDDED WITH SCENES THAT STICK IN THE MIND. He looks at strangers with a novelist's eye, and his portraits are pleasantly tinged with malice".</p><p>— The Washington Post Book World</p><p>"THEROUX AT HIS BEST. . An armchair trip with Theroux is sometimes dark, but always a delight".</p><p>— Playboy</p><p>"AS SATISFYING AS A GLASS OF COOL WINE ON A DUSTY CALABRIAN AFTERNOON. . With his effortless writing style, observant eye, and take-no-prisoners approach, Theroux is in top form chronicling this 18-month circuit of the Mediterranean".</p><p>— Kirkus Reviews (starred review)</p><

Paul Theroux

The Tao of Travel: Enlightenments from Lives on the Road

<p>“A book to be plundered and raided.” — </p><p>“A portal into a world of timeless travel literature curated by one of the greatest travel writers of our day.” — </p><p>Paul Theroux celebrates fifty years of wandering the globe in this collection of the best writing from the books that have shaped him as a reader and a traveler. Part philosophical guide, part miscellany, part reminiscence, contains excerpts from the best of Theroux’s own work interspersed with selections from travelers both familiar and unexpected:</p><p>“Dazzling. . Like someone panning for gold, Theroux reread hundreds of travel classics and modern works, shaking out the nuggets.” — </p><

Steven Saylor

Roman blood

Roma sub Rosa

Paul Theroux

Sir Vidia's Shadow: A Friendship Across Five Continents

This heartfelt and revealing account of Paul Theroux's thirty-year friendship with the legendary V. S. Naipaul is an intimate record of a literary mentorship that traces the growth of both writers' careers and explores the unique effect each had on the other. Built around exotic landscapes, anecdotes that are revealing, humorous, and melancholy, and three decades of mutual history, this is a personal account of how one develops as a writer and how a friendship waxes and wanes between two men who have set themselves on the perilous journey of a writing life.<

Paul Theroux

Hotel Honolulu

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. Honeymooners, vacationers, wanderers, mythomaniacs, soldiers, and families all check in to the hotel. Like the Canterbury pilgrims, every guest has come in search of something — sun, love, happiness, objects of unnameable longing — and everyone has a story. By turns hilarious, ribald, tender, and tragic, HOTEL HONOLULU offers a unique glimpse of the psychological landscape of an American paradise.<

Steven Saylor

Catilina's riddle

Roma sub Rosa

Steven Saylor

The judgement of Caesar

Roma sub Rosa

Paul Theroux

To the Ends of the Earth: The Selected Travels

The author of the phenomenally selling Riding the Iron Rooster presents his own choice selection of his best travel writing. "There are those who think Theroux is the finest travel writer working in English. This collection can only enhance that reputation".-The New York Times Book Review.<

Steven Saylor

Arms of Nemesis

Roma sub Rosa

Justin Taylor

Flings: Stories

<p>The acclaimed author of Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever and The Gospel of Anarchy makes his hardcover debut with a piercing collection of short fiction that illuminates our struggle to find love, comfort, and identity.</p><p>"A master of the modern snapshot." — Los Angeles Times</p><p>"A contemporary voice that this new generation of skeptics has long awaited-a young champion of literature." — New York Press</p><p>In a new suite of powerful and incisive stories, Justin Taylor captures the lives of men and women unmoored from their pasts and uncertain of their futures.</p><p>A man writes his girlfriend a Dear John letter, gets in his car, and just drives. A widowed insomniac is roused from malaise when an alligator appears in her backyard. A group of college friends try to stay close after graduation, but are drawn away from-and back toward-each other by the choices they make. A boy's friendship with a pair of identical twins undergoes a strange and tragic evolution over the course of adolescence. A promising academic and her fiancée attempt to finish their dissertations, but struggle with writer's block, a nasty secret, and their own expert knowledge of Freud.</p><p>From an East Village rooftop to a cabin in Tennessee, from the Florida suburbs to Hong Kong, Taylor covers a vast emotional and geographic landscape while ushering us into an abiding intimacy with his characters. Flings is a commanding work of fiction that captures the contemporary search for identity, connection, and a place to call home.</p><

Steven Saylor

The House Of The Vestals

Roma sub Rosa

Steven Saylor

The Venus Throw

Roma sub Rosa

Paul Theroux

Murder in Mount Holly

<p>Paul Theroux, one of the world’s most popular authors, both for his travel books and his fiction, has produced an off-beat story of 1960s weirdos unlike anything he has ever written.</p><p>During the time of Lyndon Johnson’s presidency, Herbie Gneiss is forced to leave college to get a job. His income from the Kant-Brake toy factory, which manufactures military toys for children, keeps his chocolate-loving mother from starvation. Mr. Gibbon, a patriotic veteran of three wars, also works at Kant-Brake. When Herbie is drafted, Mr. Gibbon falls in love with Herbie’s mother and they move in together at Miss Ball’s rooming house. Since Herbie is fighting for his country, Mr. Gibbon feels that he, too, should do something for his country and convinces Miss Ball and Mrs. Gneiss to join him in the venture. They decide to rob the Mount Holly Trust Company because it is managed by a small dark man who is probably a communist. There are some complications. Combine Donald E. Westlake with Abby Hoffman, add a bit of Gore Vidal at his most vitriolic, and you will have </p><

Steven Saylor

A Mist of Prophecies

Roma sub Rosa

Paul Theroux

Mr. Bones: Twenty Stories

<p>In this new collection of short stories, acclaimed author Paul Theroux explores the tenuous leadership of the elite and the surprising revenge of the overlooked. He shows us humanity possessed, consumed by its own desire and compulsion, always with his carefully honed eye for detail and the subtle idiosyncrasies that bring his characters to life. Searing, dark, and sure to unsettle, is a stunning new display of Paul Theroux’s “fluent, faintly sinister powers of vision and imagination” (John Updike, ).</p><

Steven Saylor

Last seen in Massilia

Roma sub Rosa

Paul Theroux

Picture Palace

<p>Never a dull moment. . Vivid and deft.” — </p><p>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 been in the public eye since the 1920s, and her unparalleled portfolio includes intimate portraits of Gertrude Stein, Hemingway, and Picasso. While Maude possesses a singular capability to expose the inner lives of her subjects, she is obsessive about protecting her own, hiding her deepest secret in the “picture palace” of her memory. But when a young archivist comes to stay in Maude’s Cape Cod home and begins sorting through her fifty years of work, Maude is forced to face her past and come to terms, at last, with the tragedies she’s buried.</p><p>“A breathtaking tale. . Intangibly, intricately brilliant.” — (UK)</p><

Vladimir Todorov

Archipelago N.Y.: Flynn

<p>Fifty odd years after the Great Flood, Manhattan’s tallest buildings stand wretchedly half-drowned, surrounded by a vast, unending ocean of water. The world of bygone days obliterated. Long forgotten. Now, the city of New York is called the Archipelago, its former skyscrapers just a string of man-made islands. Dry land is non-existent. Or so they say. </p><p>Sixteen-year-old Flynn Perry was born in the slums of the Archipelago’s Lower Side. But he won’t spend the rest of his life in servitude, struggling to survive. Not if he can help it! Reckless and often selfish, Flynn’s got big plans for the future. Competing in the Archipelago’s Scavenger Trials is just the start. Winning the prestigious title of a Free Scavenger is his only chance of a better life on the Upper Side. When he has a run-in with the son of the Archipelago’s ruler, Flynn may not even make it to the Trials. Caught in the middle, torn between the two boys is the beautiful and feisty Madison Ray. She holds the key to making Flynn’s dreams come true — at a terrible price. </p><p>Love, loss, betrayal and death flow with the tides that swirl around the Archipelago. Surviving these treacherous waters is only the beginning of Flynn’s journey as a Free Scavenger. But great achievement will mean nothing when the lives of loved ones are at stake. Is Flynn a follower or a leader? The choices he makes in the depths of the Archipelago will define Flynn and show the kind man he will be one day. </p><

Steven Saylor

A Gladiator Dies Only Once

Roma sub Rosa

Lynne Tillman

American Genius: A Comedy

Lynne Tillman’s previous novels have won her both popular approval and critical praise from such literary heavyweights as Edmund White and Colm Tóibín. With her first novel since 1998's she shows what might happen if Jane Austen were writing in 21st-century America. Employing her trademark crystalline prose and intricate, hypnotic sentences, Tillman fashions a microcosm of American democracy: a scholarly colony functioning like Melville’s . In this otherworld, competing values — rationality and irrationality, generosity and selfishness, love and lust, shame and honor — collide through a witty narrative, cycling through such disparate tropes as skin disease, chair design, and Manifest Destiny. All this is folded into the narrator’s memories and emotional life, culminating in a séance that may offer escape and transcendence — or perhaps nothing. Grand and minute, elegiac and hilarious, Lynne Tillman expands the possibilities of the American novel in this dazzling read.<

Steven Saylor

The Triumph Of Caesar

Roma sub Rosa

Lynne Tillman

Cast in Doubt

<p>While the tumultuous 1970s rock the world around them, a collection of aging expatriates linger in a quiet town on the island of Crete, where they have escaped their pasts and their present. Among them is Horace, a gay American writer who fears he has finally reached old age. Friends only frustrate him, and his youthful Greek lover provides little satisfaction. Idling his time away with alcohol and working on a novel that he will never finish, Horace feels closer than ever to his own sorry end.</p><p>That is, until a young, enigmatic American woman named Helen joins his crowd of outsiders. In Helen, Horace discovers someone brilliant, beautiful, and stubbornly mysterious — in short, she becomes his absolute obsession.</p><p>But as Horace knows, people have a way of preserving their secrets even as they try to forget them. Soon, Helen’s past begins to follow her to Crete. A suicidal ex-lover appears without warning; whispers of her long-dead sister surface in local gossip; and signs of ancient Gypsy rituals come to the fore. Helen vanishes. Deep down, Horace knows that he must find her before he can find any peace within himself.</p><

Steven Saylor

Rubicon

Roma sub rosa

Lynne Tillman

Haunted Houses

In uncompromising and fresh prose, Tillman tells the story of three very contemporary girls. Grace, Emily and Jane collide with friends, family, and culture under dark and comic circumstances, presented in uncanny, disturbing, and sometimes shocking terms. In , Tillman wries of the past within the present, and of the inescapability of private memory and public history. A caustic account of how America makes and unmakes a young woman.<

Steven Saylor

A murder on the Appian way

Roma sub rosa

Lynne Tillman

Motion Sickness

For the narrator of , life is an unguided tour, populated with hotels, art, strangers, books, and movies. Adrift in Europe in the late 1980s, she improvises a life and a self. In London, she’s befriended by an expatriate American Buddhist and her mysterious husband, who may be following her. In Paris, she discovers Arlette, an art historian obsessed with Velazquez's painting “Las Meninas.” In Barcelona, she is befriended by two generations of Germans, pre- and post-World War 2. She tours the hill towns of Italy, in a London taxi, with two surprising Englishmen, brothers in pursuit of art and Henry Moore. And everywhere she goes she collects postcards.<

Simon Scarrow

Under The Eagle

Cato

Lynne Tillman

No Lease on Life

<p>This book channels the rage, filth, anguish, and the bust-a-gut hilarity of pre-gentrified New York.</p><p>The New York of Lynne Tillman’s hilarious, audacious fourth novel is a boiling point of urban decay. The East Village streets are overrun with crooked cops, drug addicts, pimps, and prostitutes. Garbage piles up along the sidewalks amid the blaring soundtrack of car stereos. Confrontations are supercharged by the summer heat wave. This merciless noise has left Elizabeth Hall an insomniac. Junkies roam her building and overturn trashcans, but the landlord refuses to help clean or repair the decrepit conditions. Live-in boyfriend Roy is good-natured but too avoidant to soothe the sores of city life. Though Elizabeth fights for sanity in this apathetic metropolis, violent fantasies threaten to push her over the edge. In vivid detail, she begins to imagine murders: those of the “morons” she despises, and, most obsessively, her own. Frightening, hilarious, and wholly addictive, is an avant-garde sucker-punch, a plea for humanity propelled by dark wit and unflinching honesty. Tillman’s spare prose, frank, poignant and always illuminating, captures all the raving absurdity of a very bad day in America's toughest, hottest melting pot.</p><

Simon Scarrow

The Eagles Conquest

Cato

Lynne Tillman

Someday This Will Be Funny

<p>The stories in marry memory to moment in a union of narrative form as immaculate and imperfect as the characters damned to act them out on page. Lynne Tillman, author of , presides over the ceremony; Clarence Thomas, Marvin Gaye, and Madame Realism mingle at the reception. Narrators — by turn infamous and nameless — shift within their own skin, struggling to unknot reminiscence from reality while scenes rush into warm focus, then cool, twist, and snap in the breeze of shifting thought. Epistle, quotation, and haiku bounce between lyrical passages of lucid beauty, echoing the scattered, cycling arpeggio of Tillman’s preferred subject: the unsettled mind.</p><p>Collectively, these stories own a conscience shaped by oaths made and broken; by the skeleton silence and secrets of family; by love’s shifting chartreuse. They traffic in the quiet images of personal history, each one a flickering sacrament in danger of being swallowed up by the lust and desperation of their possessor: a fistful of parking tickets shoved in the glove compartment, a little black book hidden from a wife in a safe-deposit box, a planter stuffed with flowers to keep out the cooing mourning doves. They are stories fashioned with candor and animated by fits of wordplay and invention — stories that affirm Tillman’s unshakable talent for wedding the patterns and rituals of thought with the blushing immediacy of existence, defying genre and defining contemporary short fiction.</p><

Simon Scarrow4_

The Eagle and the Wolves

Cato

Lynne Tillman

What Would Lynne Tillman Do?

<p>Here is an American mind contemplating contemporary society and culture with wit, imagination, and a brave intelligence. Tillman upends expectations, shifts tone, introduces characters, breaches limits of genre and category, reconfiguring the world with the turn of a sentence. Like other unique thinkers, Tillman sees the world differently — she is not a malcontent, but she is discontented. Her responses to art and literature, to social and political questions change the reader's mind, startling it with new angles. Which is why so many of us who know her work often wonder: what would Lynne Tillman do? A long-time resident of New York, Tillman's sharp humor is like her city's, tough and hilarious. There are distinct streams of concern coursing through the seeming eclecticism of topics — Hillary Clinton, Jane Bowles, O.J. Simpson, art and artists, Harry Mathews, the state of fiction, film, the state of her mind, the State of the Nation. There is a great variety, but what remains consistent is how differently she writes about them, how well she understands, how passionate and bold her writing is.</p><p>What does Lynne Tillman do? Everything. Anything. You name it. She has a conversation with you, and you're a better, smarter person for it.</p><

Simon Scarrow

The Eagles Prey

Cato

Marilyn Todd

Virgin Territory

Claudia Seferius

Simon Scarrow

The Eagles Prophecy

Cato

Marilyn Todd

I, Claudia

Claudia Seferius

Simon Scarrow

The Eagle In the Sand

Cato

Nikanor Teratologen

Assisted Living: A Novel

…or perhaps author Nikanor Teratologen is the devil himself, sending the English-speaking world a Scandinavian squib to remind readers that such reassuring figures as vampires and serial killers are no more frightening than pixies or unicorns in light of the depravity contained in one quiet suburb. Reading like a deranged hybrid of , and , and rivaling in its challenge to our assumptions as to what is acceptable (or not) in literature, presents us with a series of queasy anecdotes concerning an eleven-year-old boy and his grandfather, a monster for whom murder, violence, incest, drunkenness, and philosophy all pass as equally valid ways to spend one’s time. Whether it’s a study in excess, a parody of provincial proto-fascism, a clear-eyed look at evil, or simply a prodigious literary dare, is unlikely to leave you indifferent.<

Our ads partner

Choose a genre