Paul Theroux, página 3 de 8

A compendium of travel writing from a master traveller. Part philosophical guide, part miscellany, part reminiscence, it celebrates fifty years of wandering the globe by collecting the best writing on travel from the books that shaped the author, as a reader and a traveller.

A family watches, horrified, as their patriarch transforms into the wise-cracking lead of an old-timey minstrel show. An art collector gleefully destroys his most valuable pieces. A young artist devotes himself to a wealthy, malicious gossip, knowing that it's just a matter of time before she turns on him. In this new collection of short stories, 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 desires, always with his carefully honed eye and the subtle idiosyncrasies that bring his characters to life.

The Last Train to Zona Verde is Paul Theroux's compelling account of his final African journey. Heading north from Cape Town, through South Africa, Namibia, Botswana and Angola, Paul Theroux makes a final journey along Africa's western edge. The end of the line is the Congo but Theroux discovers that his trip's pleasures are tempered by a growing sense that the Africa which so long ago helped form him has vanished, along with the hopes of many of its people. Yet after 2,500 miles Theroux finds that though this will be his ultimate African adventure there are still surprises to be found by the traveller prepared to step off the beaten track. "A melancholic, farewell journey...Theroux does all this inimitably, and more, getting better the more detours he takes". (Evening Standard). "Hard to put down, brutal honesty. Theroux proves himself a sharp observer of human foibles and a master of pithy description. The book he has crafted out of his experiences packs plenty of bang". (Spectator). "As we worry about the future of the continent, there could be no better guide than Theroux ...his sense that this is his final journey adds to the power". (GQ). "Excellent, barbed reportage". (Independent). "Probably the most important travel writer of his generation". (Sunday Times). Paul Theroux's books include Dark Star Safari, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, Riding the Iron Rooster, The Great Railway Bazaar, The Elephanta Suite, A Dead Hand, The Tao of Travel and The Lower River. The Mosquito Coast and Dr Slaughter have both been made into successful films. Paul Theroux divides his time between Cape Cod and the Hawaiian islands.

"Suave and accomplished . . . [The stories] are unsettling, resistant to tidy denouement and faintly misanthropic." -- "Washington Post" "Beneath the deceptive elegance of these stories, land mines lurk, and Theroux detonates them with gusto." -- "O, the Oprah Magazine" A family watches their patriarch transform into the singing, wisecracking lead of an old-timey minstrel show. An art collector publicly destroys his most valuable pieces. Two boys stand by as their father wages war on the raccoons living under their house. In this new collection, acclaimed author Paul Theroux shows us humanity possessed, consumed by compulsive desire, always with his carefully honed eye for detail and the subtle idiosyncrasies that bring his characters to life. Searing, dark, and sure to unsettle, "Mr. Bones" is a stunning display of Theroux's "fluent, faintly sinister powers of vision and imagination" ("The New Yorker"). "Fans of Theroux's fiction will be pleased to observe, in the twenty stories collected in "Mr. Bones, " clear evidence of how little he has mellowed over time . . . "Mr. Bones" is a series of characteristically dark and sharply focused snapshots from the world that Paul Theroux has observed--and invented." -- Francine Prose, "New York Times Book Review"

The Mosquito Coast - winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize - is a breathtaking novel about fanaticism and a futile search for utopia from bestseller Paul Theroux. Published as a Penguin Essential for the first time. Allie Fox is going to re-create the world. Abominating the cops, crooks, junkies and scavengers of modern America, he abandons civilisation and takes the family to live in the Honduran jungle. There his tortured, messianic genius keeps them alive, his hoarse tirades harrying them through a diseased and dirty Eden towards unimaginable darkness. "Stunning...exciting, intelligent, meticulously realised, artful." (Victoria Glendinning, Sunday Times). "An epic of paranoid obsession that swirls the reader headlong to deposit him on a black mudbank of horror." (Christopher Wordsworth, Guardian). "Magnificently stimulating and exciting." (Anthony Burgess).

Mr Bones is a sparkling and darkly humorous collection of short stories by bestselling novelist and travel writer Paul Theroux.A family watches, horrified, as their patriarch transforms into the wise-cracking lead of an old-timey minstrel show. An art collector gleefully destroys his most valuable pieces. A young artist devotes himself to a wealthy, malicious gossip, knowing that it''s just a matter of time before she turns on him.In this new collection of short stories, 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 desires, always with his carefully honed eye and the subtle idiosyncrasies that bring his characters to life.

In this modern version of the Grand Tour, Paul Theroux sets off from Gibralter, one of the Pillars of Hercules, his destination the southern pillar. Instead of crossing the straits, he chose to travel the long way, up the coast of Spain along the Riviera, and by ferry to Corsica, Sardinia, Sicily and beyond - way beyond, avoiding the cross-fire of Croatia, through the near anarchy of Albania and on to a ship through the Levant with 100 Turks. It is a long and lively trip, some of it in search of Waugh's labels, Fitzgerald's "Tender is the Night" and the landmarks of "The Odyssey".

Nogales is a border town caught between Mexico and the United States of America. A forty-foot steel fence runs through its centre, separating the prosperous US side from the impoverished Mexican side. It is a fascinating site of tension, now more than ever, as the town fills with hopeful border crossers and the deportees who have been caught and brought back. And it is here that Paul Theroux will begin his journey into the culturally rich but troubled heart of modern Mexico.Moving through the deserts just south of the Arizona border, Theroux finds a place brimming with charm, yet visibly marked by both the US border patrol looming to the north and mounting discord from within. Attending local language and culinary schools, driving through the country and meeting its people, Paul Theroux gets under the skin of Mexico.From the writer praised for his 'curiosity and affection for humanity in all its forms' (New York Times Book Review), On The Plain of Snakes is an urgent and mesmerising exploration of a region in conflict.