Can-Cans, Cats and Cities of Ash (Great Journeys)


Mark Twain - 2007
    Great Journeys allows readers to travel both around the planet and back through the centuries – but also back into ideas and worlds frightening, ruthless and cruel in different ways from our own. Few reading experiences can begin to match that of engaging with writers who saw astounding things: Great civilisations, walls of ice, violent and implacable jungles, deserts and mountains, multitudes of birds and flowers new to science. Reading these books is to see the world afresh, to rediscover a time when many cultures were quite strange to each other, where legends and stories were treated as facts and in which so much was still to be discovered.

Life on the Golden Horn


Mary Wortley Montagu - 2007
    Allows readers to travel both around the planet and back through the centuries - but also back into ideas and worlds frightening, ruthless and cruel in different ways from our own.

The Cobra's Heart (Penguin Great Journeys)


Ryszard Kapuściński - 2007
    Humane, evocative and magical, The Cobra's Heart makes the case for Kapuscinski as a great writer as well as a great journalist.

In the Heart of the Amazon Forest (Penguin Great Journeys)


Henry Walter Bates - 1863
    Great Journeys allows readers to travel both around the planet and back through the centuries - but also back into ideas and worlds frightening, ruthless and cruel in different ways from our own. Few reading experiences can begin to match that of engaging with writers who saw astounding things: great civilizations, walls of ice, violent and implacable jungles, deserts and mountains, and multitudes of birds and flowers new to science.

Across the Empty Quarter


Wilfred Thesiger - 2007
    The result was a monument both to his resilience and to the Bedu who guided him and who emerge as the book's real heroes.An extract of 'Arabian Sands, 1959.

Borneo, Celebes, Aru


Alfred Russel Wallace - 1869
    Whether living with Hill Dyaks or hunting Orang-Utans or sailing on a junk to the unbelievably remote Aru islands, Wallace opens our eyes to a now long vanished world.

Fighting in Spain


George Orwell - 2007
    

Adventures in the Rocky Mountains


Isabella Lucy Bird - 1879
    Each beautifully packaged volume offers a way to see the world anew, to rediscover great civilizations and legends, vast deserts and unspoiled mountain ranges, unusual flora and strange new creatures, and much more.

Snakes with Wings and Gold-digging Ants


Herodotus - 2007
    Each beautifully packaged volume offers a way to see the world anew, to rediscover great civilizations and legends, vast deserts andunspoiled mountain ranges, unusual flora and strange new creatures, and much more.

Jaguars and Electric Eels (Penguin Great Journeys)


Alexander von Humboldt - 1853
    This part of his matchless narrative of adventure and scientific research focuses on his time in Venezuela - in the Llanos and on the Orinoco River - riding and paddling, restlessly and happily noting the extraordinary things on every hand. Great Journeys allows readers to travel both around the planet and back through the centuries -- but also back into ideas and worlds frightening, ruthless and cruel in different ways from our own.

Escape from the Antarctic (Penguin Great Journeys)


Ernest Shackleton - 1919
    Through one of the greatest recorded feats of navigation and of leadership, he overcame almost impossible odds and rescued every one of his men from otherwise certain death.

Sold as a Slave


Olaudah Equiano - 2007
    His account of his life is not only one of the great documents of the abolition movement, but also a startling, moving story of danger and betrayal. "Great Journeys" allows readers to travel both around the planet and back through the centuries - but also back into ideas and worlds frightening, ruthless and cruel in different ways from our own. Few reading experiences can begin to match that of engaging with writers who saw astounding things: great civilisations, walls of ice, violent and implacable jungles, deserts and mountains, multitudes of birds and flowers new to science. Reading these books is to see the world afresh, to rediscover a time when many cultures were quite strange to each other, where legends and stories were treated as facts and in which so much was still to be discovered.

An Armenian Sketchbook


Vasily Grossman - 1965
    An Armenian Sketchbook, however, shows us a very different Grossman, notable for his tenderness, warmth, and sense of fun.       After the  Soviet Government confiscated—or, as Grossman always put it, “arrested”—Life and Fate, he took on the task of revising a literal Russian translation of a long Armenian novel. The novel was of little interest to him, but he needed money and was evidently glad of an excuse to travel to Armenia. An Armenian Sketchbook is his account of the two months he spent there.       This is by far the most personal and intimate of Grossman’s works, endowed with an air of absolute spontaneity, as though he is simply chatting to the reader about his impressions of Armenia—its mountains, its ancient churches, its people—while also examining his own thoughts and moods. A wonderfully human account of travel to a faraway place, An Armenian Sketchbook also has the vivid appeal of a self-portrait.

In Memory of Memory


Maria Stepanova - 2017
    Carefully reassembled with calm, steady hands, these shards tell the story of an ordinary family that somehow managed to survive the myriad persecutions and repressions of the last century. The family’s pursuit of a quiet, civilized, ordinary life—during such atrocious times—is itself a strange odyssey.In dialogue with thinkers like Roland Barthes, W. G. Sebald, Susan Sontag, and Osip Mandelstam, In Memory of Memory is imbued with rare intellectual curiosity and a wonderfully soft-spoken, poetic voice. Dipping into various genres—essay, fiction, memoir, travelogue, and history—Stepanova assembles a vast panorama of ideas and personalities and offers a bold exploration of cultural and personal memory.

Ilf and Petrov's American Road Trip: The 1935 Travelogue of Two Soviet Writers


Ilya Ilf - 1936
    They drove cross-country and back on a ten-week trip, recording images of American life through humerous texts and the lens of a Leica camera. When they returned home, they published their work in Ogonek, the Soviet equivalent of Time magazine, and later in the book Odnoetazhnaia Amerika (Single-Storied America). This wonderful lost workfilled with wry observations, biting opinions, and telling photographsis now collected in Ilf and Petrov's American Road Trip, the first English translation.From Ilf and Petrov's American Road Trip:"The word 'America' has well-developed grandiose associations for a Soviet person, for whom it refers to a country of skyscrapers, where day and night one hears the unceasing thunder of surface and underground trains, the hellish roar of automobile horns, and the continuous despairing screams of stockbrokers rushing through the skyscrapers waving their ever-falling shares. We want to change that image."A Cabinet Book published by Princeton Architectural Press