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The first time I left home, at 21, I ran out of money after three months, but I was so dead set on staying abroad that I pushed on. I ended up being gone for 18 months and traveled through 40 countries. Before I turned 30, I completed 10 six-month trips abroad, each with a long overland journey built-in, and hit close to 100 countries. Most of my travel was in the last decade before cell phones and the internet. I’ve been a member of The Explorers Club for twenty+ years and chair its Southwest Chapter.
I reread this book once a decade, and each time, I get more out of it. It follows a man named Larry Darrell who searches for a deeper meaning to life—spiritual enlightenment.
It’s a wonderful book, and I am sure it has inspired others to look a little deeper into what they hold important. I empathized with Larry’s disenchantment with the “good” life, and I felt, at times, I could glimpse his elusive goal within Larry's story.
The fact that it entailed giving up all possessions and hitting the road seemed perfect to me.
Larry Darrell is a young American in search of the absolute. The progress of this spiritual odyssey involves him with some of Maugham's most brillant characters - his fiancee Isabel, whose choice between love and wealth have lifelong repercussions, and Elliot Templeton, her uncle, a classic expatriate American snob. The most ambitious of Maugham's novels, this is also one in which Maugham himself plays a considerable part as he wanders in and out of the story, to observe his characters struggling with their fates.
The first time I left home, at 21, I ran out of money after three months, but I was so dead set on staying abroad that I pushed on. I ended up being gone for 18 months and traveled through 40 countries. Before I turned 30, I completed 10 six-month trips abroad, each with a long overland journey built-in, and hit close to 100 countries. Most of my travel was in the last decade before cell phones and the internet. I’ve been a member of The Explorers Club for twenty+ years and chair its Southwest Chapter.
Maybe the best way to feel the road is through the eyes of someone deprived of his/her freedom. I’ve never been in a foreign prison, but I have sat in a few jails, and the prospects of long-term confinement always terrified me.
In the early 1930s, Henri Charriere was sentenced to life imprisonment in the brutal penal colony of French Guiana for a crime he didn’t commit.
In this memoir, I yearned for blue skies and open roads as I followed Henri’s desperate escape attempts and refusal to accept confinement. I’ve never wanted someone to get away so badly.
An immediate sensation upon its publication in 1969, Papillon is a vivid memoir of brutal penal colonies, daring prison breaks and heroic adventure on shark-infested seas.
Condemned for a murder he did not commit, Henri Charriere, nicknamed Papillon, was sent to the penal colony of French Guiana. Forty-two days after his arrival he made his first break for freedom, travelling a thousand gruelling miles in an open boat. He was recaptured and put into solitary confinement but his spirit remained untamed: over thirteen years he made nine incredible escapes, including from the notorious penal colony on Devil's Island.
The first time I left home, at 21, I ran out of money after three months, but I was so dead set on staying abroad that I pushed on. I ended up being gone for 18 months and traveled through 40 countries. Before I turned 30, I completed 10 six-month trips abroad, each with a long overland journey built-in, and hit close to 100 countries. Most of my travel was in the last decade before cell phones and the internet. I’ve been a member of The Explorers Club for twenty+ years and chair its Southwest Chapter.
I’ve spent a few years traveling around India and Nepal, a lot of it, pre-internet, and I always wanted to find that experience captured in literature.
Although I enjoyed writing on the area, from City of Joy by Lapierre to Kim by Kipling, nothing came close to the India I stumbled through until I read Shantaram.
I was never hooked on heroin or part of the mafia, but I recognized the smell of the streets and the beautiful personalities that flourished there, and when I read that book, it was like I was there again, in the mix.
Now a major television series from Apple TV+ starring Charlie Hunnam!
“It took me a long time and most of the world to learn what I know about love and fate and the choices we make, but the heart of it came to me in an instant, while I was chained to a wall and being tortured.”
An escaped convict with a false passport, Lin flees maximum security prison in Australia for the teeming streets of Bombay, where he can disappear. Accompanied by his guide and faithful friend, Prabaker, the two enter the city’s hidden society of beggars and gangsters,…
The first time I left home, at 21, I ran out of money after three months, but I was so dead set on staying abroad that I pushed on. I ended up being gone for 18 months and traveled through 40 countries. Before I turned 30, I completed 10 six-month trips abroad, each with a long overland journey built-in, and hit close to 100 countries. Most of my travel was in the last decade before cell phones and the internet. I’ve been a member of The Explorers Club for twenty+ years and chair its Southwest Chapter.
Even after I became a traveler, I found myself pulled into Bruce Chatwin's writings because of his ability to make you feel more than just a location.
His stories about nomadic people and exotic places blend fact with fiction to give a fuller picture. I’ve read all of his work, but this book made me feel he was a kindred spirit.
One story in particular, Milk, captured the raw yearning to dive head-first into a foreign culture and made me a lifelong fan.
It is commonly supposed that Bruce Chatwin was an ingenuous latecomer to the profession of letters, a misapprehension given apparent credence by that now famous passage in his lyrical, autobiographical "I Always Wanted to Go to Patagonia," in which we are told that this indefatigable traveler's literary career began in midstride, almost on a whim, with a telegram announcing his departure for the farthest-flung corner of the globe: "Have gone to Patagonia." Such a view overlooks the fact that from the late 1960s onward Chatwin was already fashioning the tools of his future trade in the columns of a variety…
I am an engineer, scientist, turned technology manager who works in the field of Artificial Intelligence, and have gotten lost in Sci-Fi since I could first read. Now I want to share the stories that keep me awake at night.
OK, so I was biased by Robin Williams in the movie, but here we have a robot that shows creativity! Its “Masters” tolerate this, then encourage it, and soon Andrew is selling his brand – created by a robot! I like the way a hobby turned into a business. He becomes part of the family, and as those around him age and die he becomes alone, something that runs through my mind sometimes late at night. Andrew decides that he wants to be human, and the barrier is his immortality.
This classic collection includes the title story, acclaimed as Asimov's single finest Robot tale, and now made into a Hollywood movie starring Robin Williams. Each of the eleven stories here sparkle with characteristic Asimov inventiveness and imagination.
I grew up on a farm in Northern Ireland. Ulster was always an inspiration, for both my painting and my writing. My first novel, The Misremembered Man, became a bestseller worldwide, and I followed it with several more works of fiction. I attribute their success to the magic of rural Ireland, and the wonderful characters who peopled my childhood. My formative years, unhappy and fearful though they were, serve as a repository of emotion and stimulation, which I draw upon frequently in my writing. Having the courage to change and grow in difficult circumstances is a common theme. Since all my novels are character-driven, my book choices broadly reflect this strength in the authors I have chosen.
Elizabeth Taylor—not to be confused with the actress of the same name—has been called ‘the unsung heroine of British twentieth-century fiction.’ I wholeheartedly agree, and Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont is Taylor at her sublime best. It’s the tale of an elderly woman, wealthy but recently widowed, who’s faced with a choice: "Do I spend my last days in a care home—or check into a grand hotel?" She opts for the latter and finds herself among a group of fascinating characters, each as eccentric as she herself.
Insightful about the sadness and loneliness of ageing, this book did notmake me feel despondent about growing older. On the contrary, it showed me that love, happiness, and a sense of adventure can be ours at any age, if we’re willing to take chances and open our hearts to others.
'Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont is, for me, her masterpiece' - Robert McCrum, Guardian, 'The Best 100 Novels' 'An author of great subtlety, great compassion and great depth' - SARAH WATERS 'Jane Austen, Elizabeth Taylor, Elizabath Bowen - soul-sisters all' ANNE TYLER
On a rainy Sunday in January, the recently widowed Mrs Palfrey arrives at the Claremont Hotel where she will spend her remaining days. Her fellow residents are magnificently eccentric and endlessly curious, living off crumbs of affection and snippets of gossip. Together, upper lips stiffened, they fight off their twin enemies: boredom and the Grim Reaper.
When writing about women's lives, it's important to me to get below the surface and question the things that really have an impact on how we live and breathe, how we relate to others as friends or lovers, how we feel guilt, pain, joy, and ecstasy, how we relish triumph and mitigate disaster, how we grow old and hope and think and make our way from start to finish in a turbulent world. I try to tell the truth as a writer and make new discoveries along the way. I’ve published two novels and two collections of short stories, and I’m a reviewer and writer on literature, a teacher too.
Love, desire, falling too passionately for a married man, the world may be different from when this book was published in 1936, but the angst, the joy, the terror, and the hard choices remain the same.
An intelligent, capable, charismatic woman falls for a handsome, upper-class man, tantalizingly just out of her social and emotional reach. Will he leave his wife and the easy security of a stable relationship? Will love trump duty? Life-changing decisions reach a climax in the office of a back-street abortionist, where the snare of passion and its potentially destructive consequences are laid bare.
Written in lyrical and episodic prose, this is a truly timeless and memorable read.
ONE OF THE MOST REMARKABLE BRITISH WRITERS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
'With brilliant dialogue and intense passages of elation and despair, The Weather in the Streets takes you on the rollercoaster of their relationship' ESTHER FREUD, SUNDAY TELEGRAPH'Lehmann legitimised a type of writing that took on deep personal themes' ENGLISH PEN'The first writer to filter her stories through a woman's feelings & perceptions' ANITA BROOKNERTaking up where Invitation to the Waltz left off, The Weather in the Streets shows us Olivia Curtis ten years older, a failed marriage behind her, thinner, sadder, and apparently not much wiser.…
I’ve been a journalist for years, and to write my first book, I ended up doing a ton of original research and reporting about photography, fashion, the art world, and the magazine industry in midcentury New York. But certain passages in the twins’ interviews reminded me strongly of many books I’d read growing up, that address the challenges young women face as they confront choices in life. And their story, with its wild and colorful characters, begged to be structured like a novel. It also took place when American society was changing dramatically for women, as it is today. So, I kept books like these in mind while writing.
I fell in love with designer Vicky Tiel’s 2011 memoir because of what I’ll call its “sex-positive” rompiness, which reads like a Swinging Sixties female version of Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones. (I stumbled upon it during research because it includes some of my characters, primarily Mia Fonssagrives, daughter of supermodel Lisa Fonssagrives and stepdaughter of Irving Penn.)
In the book, Tiel, who made her name designing catsuits, hotpants, and miniskirts, explains how she and Mia went from being design students in New York to “It” fashion designers in Paris pretty much overnight. They have many adventures, bed many men, and pick up practical life advice from models and movie stars like Elizabeth Taylor while growing up. It’s a total period piece but also, it hasn’t aged. With pictures and recipes!
Vicky Tiel started as an "it" girl of the 1960s and has had a four decade career designing clothes that make real women look fabulous. Her sexy, fresh hot pants and miniskirts were used by Woody Allen in his first movie, What's New, Pussycat?, her classic design inspired the red dress that transformed Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman, and her creations are worn today by stars such as Halle Berry and Kim Kardashian. Tiel's own life has been dance-the-night-away fun, from her earliest days flunking out of Parsons to design on her own, to starting a chic boutique with best…
I have a close girlfriend who was once involved with a man she wanted to marry. The trouble was, the guy was always hanging out with this other woman who he’d known since childhood. Just friends, he said. Nothing going on. Ha! The shenanigans they got up to were unbelievable, and extremely upsetting to my girlfriend, who eventually broke up with the cad. Her unlucky experience got me interested in the psychology of the love triangle, and why some people remain mired in these dead-end relationships. My reading jam is anything twisty and suspenseful, and what’s more fraught than a three-way competition for someone’s affections.
In 1906, a handsome scoundrel named Chester Gillette murdered his girlfriend, Grace Brown, by rowing her out onto a secluded mountain lake, whacking her with a tennis racket and pushing her overboard.
Why? Grace was a lowly factory girl, and her inconvenient pregnancy threatened to rain on Chester’s skirt-chasing parade. I was sucked into this poignant tale, having camped and canoed in upstate New York where the crime took place. I even teared up as I imagined what it felt like for poor Grace, cast to the bottom of a lake by the young man she thought was going to marry her.
This carefully researched non-fiction account is an irresistible combination of detective story and romantic drama.
Over 100 years ago, the Chester Gillette Grace Brown murder case was considered the trial of the century. The case became the basis for Theodore Dreiser's classic novel An American Tragedy and the movie A Place in the Sun, starring Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor. Revisit the tragedy at Big Moose Lake and the ensuing trial in this fully revised and expanded edition of the definitive book about the Gillette Brown murder.In the 30 years since the best-selling Murder in the Adirondacks was written, author Craig Brandon has continued to research the Gillette Brown murder case. This revised and expanded…
About myself: As a novelist I’m crazy for detail. I believe it’s the odd and unexpected aspects of life that bring both characters and story worlds to life. This means that I try to be an observer at all times, keeping alert and using all five – and maybe six – senses. My perfect writing morning begins with a dog walk in the woods or on a beach, say, while keeping my senses sharp to the world around me and listening out for the first whisper of what the day’s writing will bring.
I adore this collection of women’s short stories, all written in the forties and fifties. It gives a great scatter-gun indication of the mood and moral atmosphere of the times.
The mixture contains stories by familiar writers – Daphne du Maurier’s "The Birds" is here – as well as writers who’ve been largely forgotten, like Frances Bellerby, whose delicate story "A Cut Finger" made me cry.
Reading short stories makes a welcome change from the journey of a novel, especially when I’m busy. One a night makes a perfect bedtime treat.
These remarkable short stories from the 1940s and 50s depict women and men caught between the pull of personal desires and profound social change. From a remote peninsula in Cornwall to the drawing rooms of the British Raj, domestic arrangements are rewritten, social customs are revoked and new freedoms are embraced.
Selected and introduced by writer and critic Lucy Scholes, this collection places works from renowned women writers alongside recently rediscovered voices. Suffused with tension and longing, they form a window onto a remarkable era of writing.
Contains: 'The Cut Finger' by Frances Bellerby, 'Summer Night' by Elizabeth Bowen, 'The…
