Book picks similar to
In the Galapagos Islands with Herman Melville, the Encantadas or Enchanted Isles by Herman Melville
fiction
classics
travel
short-stories
Wonderful Town: New York Stories from The New Yorker
David Remnick - 2000
Wonderful Town, an anthology of superb short fiction by many of the magazine's most accomplished contributors, celebrates the seventy-five-year marriage between a preeminent publication and its preeminent context with this collection of forty-four of its best stories from (so to speak) home. East Side? Philip Roth's chronically tormented alter ego Nathan Zuckerman has just moved there, in "Smart Money." West Side? Isaac Bashevis Singer's narrator mingles with the customers in "The Cafeteria" (who debate politics and culture in four or five different languages) and becomes embroiled in an obsessional romance. And downtown, John Updike's Maples have begun their courtship of marital disaster, in "Snowing in Greenwich Village." John Cheever, John O'Hara, Lorrie Moore, Irwin Shaw, Woody Allen, Laurie Colwin, Saul Bellow, J. D. Salinger, Jean Stafford, Vladimir Nabokov--they and many other stellar literary guides to the city will be found in these pages. Wonderful Town touches on some of the city's famous places and stops at some of its more obscure corners, but the real guidebook in and between its lines is to the hearts and the minds of those who populate the metropolis built by its pages. Like all good fiction, these stories take particular places, particular people, and particular events and turn them into dramas of universal enlightenment and emotional impact. The five boroughs are the five continents. New York is every great and ordinary place. Each life in it, and each life in Wonderful Town, is the life of us all.
Middle Passage
Charles R. Johnson - 1990
Rutherford Calhoun, a newly freed slave and irrepressible rogue, is desperate to escape unscrupulous bill collectors and an impending marriage to a priggish schoolteacher. He jumps aboard the first boat leaving New Orleans, the Republic, a slave ship en route to collect members of a legendary African tribe, the Allmuseri. Thus begins a daring voyage of horror and self-discovery.Peopled with vivid and unforgettable characters, nimble in its interplay of comedy and serious ideas, this dazzling modern classic is a perfect blend of the picaresque tale, historical romance, sea yarn, slave narrative, and philosophical novel.
A Cup of Sake Beneath the Cherry Trees
Yoshida Kenkō
Introducing Little Black Classics: 80 books for Penguin's 80th birthday. Little Black Classics celebrate the huge range and diversity of Penguin Classics, with books from around the world and across many centuries. They take us from a balloon ride over Victorian London to a garden of blossom in Japan, from Tierra del Fuego to 16th-century California and the Russian steppe. Here are stories lyrical and savage; poems epic and intimate; essays satirical and inspirational; and ideas that have shaped the lives of millions. Yoshida Kenko (c. 1283-1352). Kenko's work is included in Penguin Classics in Essays in Idleness and Hojoki.
The Coast of Chicago
Stuart Dybek - 1990
A child's collection of bottle caps becomes the tombstones of a graveyard. A lowly rightfielder's inexplicable death turns him into a martyr to baseball. Strains of Chopin floating down the tenement airshaft are transformed into a mysterious anthem of loss. Combining homely detail and heartbreakingly familiar voices with grand leaps of imagination, The Coast of Chicago is a masterpiece from one of America's most highly regarded writers.
Life in the Iron Mills
Rebecca Harding Davis - 1861
A general introduction providing historical and cultural background, a chronology of Davis' life and times, an introduction to each thematic group of documents, headnotes, extensive annotations, a generous selection of illustrations, and a selected bibliography make this volume the definitive scholarly text of this classic work of industrial fiction.---- Life in the iron-mills: the complete text --Introduction: cultural and historical background --A note on the text --Life in the iron-mills (1861 Atlantic Monthly edition) --Life in the iron-mills: cultural context --Work and class --The village blacksmith / Henry Wadsworth Longfellow --That aristocracy may be engendered by manufactures / Alexis de Tocqueville --Iron interests of wheeling / A.W. Campbell --Senate testimony from iron foundry proprietor / John Roach --In Soho on Saturday night (song) / Anonymous --Perils- immigration / Josiah Strong --The Anglo-Saxon and the world's future / Josiah Strong --Senate testimony on the kitchen garden movement / Anna Gordon --Ten nights in a bar-room (excerpt) / T.S. Arthur --The Quaker of the olden time / John Greenleaf Whittier --The Quaker settlement (from uncle tom's cabin) / Harriet Beecher Stowe --Looking Backward: 2000-1887 (excerpt) / Edward Bellamy --Art and artists --An inquiry into the art-conditions and prospects of America / James Jackson Jarves --Art thoughts (excerpt) / James Jackson Jarves --Hints to American artists / Anonymous --Conversations in a studio (excerpt)William Wetmore Story --The Stewart art gallery / Anonymous --The process of sculpture / Anonymous --The Greek slave / Anonymous --A sculptor's studio (from the marble faun) / Nathaniel Hawthorne --Roderick Hudson (excerpt) / Henry James --/ Senate testimony on the arts and art education in the United States / Wilson McDonald --Senate testimony on industrial art schools for women / Florence Elizabeth Cory --Women and writing: the public platform --Letter to George D. Ticknor / Nathaniel Hawthorne --The great lawsuit (excerpt) / Margaret Fuller --St. Elmo (excerpt) / Augusta Evans Wilson --Literary women / Caroline Kirkland --Ruth Hall (excerpt) / Fanny Fern --A New England girlhood (excerpt) / Lucy Larcom --Little Women (excerpt) / Louisa May Alcott --Life and letters of Harriet Beecher Stowe (excerpt) / Annie Fields.
The Ways of White Folks
Langston Hughes - 1934
In it, he shares acrid and poignant stories of blacks colliding--sometimes humorously, but often tragically--with whites throughout the 1920s and 1930s.The book consists of fourteen moving stories:"Cora Unashamed""Slave on the Block""Home""Passing""A Good Job Gone""Rejuvenation Through Joy""The Blues I'm Playing""Red-Headed Baby""Poor Little Black Fellow""Little Dog""Berry""Mother and Child""One Christmas Eve""Father and Son"
Don't Stop the Carnival
Herman Wouk - 1965
(Hilarity and disaster -- of a sort peculiar to the tropics -- ensue.)It's the novel in which the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of such acclaimed and bestselling novels as The Caine Mutiny and War and Remembrance draws on his own experience (Wouk and his family lived for seven years on an island in the sun) to tell a story at once brilliantly comic and deeply moving.
The Complete Short Novels
Anton Chekhov - 1896
Here, brought together in one volume for the first time, in a masterly new translation by the award-winning translators Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky.The Steppe—the most lyrical of the five—is an account of a nine-year-old boy’s frightening journey by wagon train across the steppe of southern Russia. The Duel sets two decadent figures—a fanatical rationalist and a man of literary sensibility—on a collision course that ends in a series of surprising reversals. In The Story of an Unknown Man, a political radical spying on an important official by serving as valet to his son gradually discovers that his own terminal illness has changed his long-held priorities in startling ways. Three Years recounts a complex series of ironies in the personal life of a rich but passive Moscow merchant. In My Life, a man renounces wealth and social position for a life of manual labor.The resulting conflict between the moral simplicity of his ideals and the complex realities of human nature culminates in a brief apocalyptic vision that is unique in Chekhov’s work.(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed) From the Hardcover edition.
Relato De Un Naufrago (Premio Nobel 1982)
Gabriel García Márquez - 1955
In 1955, eight crew members of the destroyer Caldas, were swept into the Caribbean Sea. The sole survivor, Luis Alejandro Belasco, told the true version of the events to Marquez, causing great scandal at the time.
One Thousand White Women: The Journals of May Dodd
Jim Fergus - 1998
government, travel to the western prairies in 1875 to intermarry among the Cheyenne Indians. The covert and controversial "Brides for Indians" program, launched by the administration of Ulysses S. Grant, is intended to help assimilate the Indians into the white man's world. Toward that end May and her friends embark upon the adventure of their lifetime. Jim Fergus has so vividly depicted the American West that it is as if these diaries are a capsule in time.
Elegy
Christie Golden - 2018
This limited edition hardback version collects two new World of Warcraft novellas from the point of view of the Alliance (Elegy, by Christie Golden) and the Horde (A Good War, by Robert Brooks). These two tales explore the Horde and the Alliance versions of a fateful event, but only you can decide which faction tells it best. Each story includes original artwork exclusive to this edition.
The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner
Alan Sillitoe - 1959
The wardens have given the boy a light workload because he shows talent as a runner. But if he wins the national long-distance running competition as everyone is counting on him to do, Smith will only vindicate the very system and society that has locked him up. “The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner” has long been considered a masterpiece on both the page and the silver screen. Adapted for film by Sillitoe himself in 1962, it became an instant classic of British New Wave cinema. In “Uncle Ernest,” a middle-aged furniture upholsterer traumatized in World War II, now leads a lonely life. His wife has left him, his brothers have moved away, and the townsfolk treat him as if he were a ghost. When the old man finally finds companionship with two young girls whom he enjoys buying pastries for at a café, the local authorities find his behavior morally suspect. “Mr. Raynor the School Teacher” delves into a different kind of isolation—that of a voyeuristic teacher who fantasizes constantly about the women who work in a draper’s shop across the street. When his students distract him from his lustful daydreams, Mr. Raynor becomes violent. The six stories that follow in this iconic collection continue to cement Alan Sillitoe’s reputation as one of Britain’s foremost storytellers, and a champion of the condemned, the oppressed, and the overlooked. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Alan Sillitoe including rare images from the author’s estate.
Hippie
Paulo Coelho - 2018
In the Dam Square in Amsterdam, long-haired young people wearing vibrant clothes and burning incense could be found meditating, playing music and discussing sexual liberation, the expansion of consciousness and the search for an inner truth. They were a generation refusing to live the robotic and unquestioning life that their parents had known.At this time, Paulo is a young, skinny Brazilian with a goatee and long, flowing hair who wants to become a writer. He sets off on a journey in search of freedom and a deeper meaning for his life: first, with a girlfriend, on the famous “Death Train to Bolivia,” then on to Peru and later hitchhiking through Chile and Argentina.His travels take him further, to the famous square in Amsterdam, where Paulo meets Karla, a Dutch woman also in her 20s. She convinces Paulo to join her on a trip to Nepal, aboard the Magic Bus that travels across Europe and Central Asia to Kathmandu. They embark on a journey in the company of fascinating fellow travelers, each of whom has a story to tell, and each of whom will undergo a transformation, changing their priorities and values, along the way. As they travel together, Paulo and Karla explore their own relationship, an awakening on every level that brings each of them to a choice and a decision that sets the course for their lives thereafter.
A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain
Robert Olen Butler - 1992
Now Grove Press is proud to reissue this contemporary classic by one of America's most important living writers, in a new edition of 'A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain' that includes two subsequently published stories -- "Salem" and "Missing" -- that brilliantly complete the collection's narrative journey, returning to the jungles of Vietnam.