One of Latin America's greatest novelists, Mario Vargas Llosa is also a most acute and wide-ranging cultural critic and an acerbic political commentator. Touchstones includes his readings of major twentieth-century novels, from Heart of Darkness...
“Who am I? An alcoholic and a tramp. But I am no white raven. Our alcoholics outnumber the populations of France and Spain combined. And that’s only the men. If you count women you have to add on all Scandinavia and throw in Monaco for good...
In Myself with Others, Fuentes has assembled essays reflecting three of the great elements of his work: autobiography, love of literature, and politics. They include his reflections on his beginning as a writer, his celebrated Harvard University...
Internationally celebrated for her novels, Nadine Gordimer has devoted much of her life and fiction to the political struggles of the Third World, the New World, and her native South Africa. Living in Hope and History is an on-the-spot record of...
‘A gem of a book, informative, companionable, sometimes funny, and wholly original. MacLean must surely be the outstanding, and most indefatigable, traveller-writer of our time’ John le Carré
In 1989 the Berlin Wall fell. In that euphoric...
Just weeks after multiple disasters struck Japan, National Book Award winner William T. Vollmann ventures into the nuclear hot zone, outfitted only with rubber kitchen gloves, a cloth facemask, and a capricious radiation detector. In this Byliner...
Joan Didion's unblinking eye and razor-sharp perceptions of the American scene are exhibited in the essays Girl of the Golden West, In the Realm of the Fisher King, and Sentimental Journeys' from After Henry; excerpts from Salvador and Miami; and...
For those interested in the connection between people and place, the best of the decade long collaboration between literary brat packer Will Self and gonzo illustrator Ralph Steadman.
Opening with a dazzling new 20,000-word essay on...