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Enemies of Promise

10 best books like Enemies of Promise (Cyril Connolly): Emperor of China: Self-Portrait of K'ang-Hsi, The Spring of My Life and Selected Haiku, Spring Essence: The Poetry of Hô Xuân Huong, Original Letters from India, The Shape of the Journey: New & Collected Poems, Eugene Onegin and Other Poems, The Quest for Corvo: An Experiment in Biography, The Ultimate Ambition in the Arts of Erudition: A Compendium of Knowledge from the Classical Islamic World, Down and Delirious in Mexico City: The Aztec Metropolis in the Twenty-First Century, The Crofter and the Laird: Life on an Hebridean Island

Emperor of China: Self-Portrait of K'ang-Hsi
AuthorKangxi
Manchu Monarch’s Memorable Moments and More

Jonathan Spence has not written any bad books. If you want readable, interesting books about China which take unusual angles, choose any of his. This one, which focuses on the life of the Qing (Manchu) emperor Kang-hsi (now spelled Kangxi) who...
The Spring of My Life and Selected Haiku
AuthorKobayashi Issa
ISBN1570621446
Kobayashi Issa (1763-1827), along with Basho and Buson, is considered one of the three greatest haiku poets of Japan, known for his attention to poignant detail and his playful sense of humor. Issa's most-loved work, The Spring of My Life, is an autobiographical sketch of linked prose and haiku in the...
Spring Essence: The Poetry of Hô Xuân Huong
AuthorHồ Xuân Hương
ISBN1556591489
Hồ Xuân Hương — whose name translates as "Spring Essence" — is one of the most important and popular poets in Vietnam. A concubine, she became renowned for her poetic skills, writing subtly risqué poems which used double entendre and sexual innuendo as a vehicle for social, religious, and...
Original Letters from India
AuthorEliza Fay
ISBN1590173368
Eliza Fay’s origins are obscure; she was not beautiful, rich, or outlandishly accomplished. Yet the letters she wrote from her 1779 voyage across the globe captivated E. M. Forster, who arranged for their British publication in 1925. The letters have been delighting readers ever since with their...
The Shape of the Journey: New & Collected Poems
AuthorJim Harrison
ISBN1556590954
Astonishing poetry collection. One of the few poets that I read cover to cover and then again few more times, untill I know each poem by heart.

Looking Forward to Age

I will walk down to a marina
on a hot day and not go out to sea.

I will go to bed and get up early,
and carry...
Eugene Onegin and Other Poems
AuthorAlexander Pushkin
ISBN0375406727
Eugene Onegin (1833) is a comedy of manners, written in exquisitely crafted verse, about two young members of the Russian gentry, the eponymous hero and the girl Tatyana, who don't quite connect. It is also the greatest masterpiece of Russian literature—the source of the human archetypes and the...
The Quest for Corvo: An Experiment in Biography
AuthorA.J.A. Symons
ISBN0940322617
One day in 1925 a friend asked A. J. A. Symons if he had read Fr. Rolfe's Hadrian the Seventh. He hadn't, but soon did, and found himself entranced by the novel -- "a masterpiece"-- and no less fascinated by the mysterious person of its all-but-forgotten creator. The Quest for Corvo is a hilarious and heartbreaking...
The Ultimate Ambition in the Arts of Erudition: A Compendium of Knowledge from the Classical Islamic World
AuthorShihab al-Din al-Nuwayri
ISBN0143107488
An astonishing record of the knowledge of a civilization, The Ultimate Ambition in the Arts of Erudition catalogues everything known to exist from the perspective of a 14th-century Egyptian scholar and litterateur. More than 9,000 pages and 30 volumes--here abridged to one volume, and translated...
Down and Delirious in Mexico City: The Aztec Metropolis in the Twenty-First Century
AuthorDaniel Hernandez
ISBN1416577033
MEXICO CITY, with some 20 million inhabitants, is the largest city in the Western Hemisphere. Enormous growth, raging crime, and tumultuous politics have also made it one of the most feared and misunderstood. Yet in the past decade, the city has become a hot spot for international business, fashion,...
The Crofter and the Laird: Life on an Hebridean Island
AuthorJohn McPhee
ISBN1899863249
There was a toast among the clans when they banqueted. A clansman would rise, lift a cup, and say, "To the land of the bens and the glens!" And up from the food the faces would move, and every man would roar out, "To the land of the bens and the glens!"

Och, a toast to start.

Our current President...
A Russian Gentleman
AuthorSergei Aksakov
ISBN0192815733
At the center of this chronicle of Russian provincial life in the reign of Catherine the Great stands the patriarchal figure of the author's grandfather, Stepan Mikhailovich. A man of great natural dignity, imbued with respect for tradition and love of the land, he is also despotic and virtually illiterate....
Sky Above, Great Wind: The Life and Poetry of Zen Master Ryokan
AuthorRyōkan
ISBN1590309820
Ryokan (1758–1831) is, along with Dogen and Hakuin, one of the three giants of Zen in Japan. But unlike his two renowned colleagues, Ryokan was a societal dropout, living mostly as a hermit and a beggar. He was never head of a monastery or temple. He liked playing with children. He had no dharma heir....
History of My Life, Vols. I & II
AuthorGiacomo Casanova
ISBN0801856620
In volumes 1 and 2, Casanova tells the story of his family, his first loves, and his early travels. With the death of his grandmother, he is sent to a seminary--but is soon expelled. He is briefly imprisoned in the fortress of Sant' Andrea. After wandering from Naples to Rome in search of a patron, he enters...
The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry
AuthorRobert Chandler
An enchanting collection of the very best of Russian poetry, edited by acclaimed translator Robert Chandler together with poets Boris Dralyuk and Irina Mashinski

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, poetry's pre-eminence in Russia was unchallenged, with Pushkin and...
South from Granada: A Sojourn in Southern Spain
AuthorGerald Brenan
The First World War had a powerful effect on many of its participants; Gerald Brenan was one of those. Brenan came from an Anglo-Irish military family. He had the usual public school education, hated it and was bullied. He was expected to go into the army, but at 18 elected instead to walk to China with a...
Flaubert in Egypt: A Sensibility on Tour
AuthorGustave Flaubert
ISBN0140435824
At once a classic of travel literature and a penetrating portrait of a “sensibility on tour,” Flaubert in Egypt wonderfully captures the young writer’s impressions during his 1849 voyages. Using diaries, letters, travel notes, and the evidence of Flaubert’s traveling companion, Maxime...
Agricultural Involution: The Processes of Ecological Change in Indonesia
AuthorClifford Geertz
ISBN0520004590
Agricultural Involution: The Processes of Ecological Change in Indonesia is one of the most famous of the early works of Clifford Geertz. It principal thesis is that many centuries of intensifying wet-rice cultivation in Indonesia had produced greater social complexity without significant...
The Rattle Bag
AuthorSeamus Heaney
The Rattle Bag is an anthology of poetry (mostly in English but occasionally in translation) for general readers and students of all ages and backgrounds. These poems have been selected by the simple yet telling criteria that they are the personal favorites of the editors, themselves two of contemporary...
Faces of Love
AuthorHafez
ISBN0143107283
Acclaimed translator Dick Davis breathes new life into the timeless works of three masters of fourteenth-century Persian literature.

Together, Hafez, a giant of world literature; Jahan Malek Khatun, an eloquent princess; and Obayd-e Zakani, a dissolute satirist, represent one of the...
The Life of Graham Greene, Vol. 1: 1904-1939
AuthorNorman Sherry
ISBN0142004200
Graham Greene was one of the most guarded and complex literary figures of our time. In the first volume of Norman Sherry’s celebrated biography, Greene’s early life is explored through letters, diaries, and hundreds of interviews, including a breakdown in his early teens, his years at Oxford,...
George Orwell: The Authorised Biography
AuthorMichael Shelden
ISBN0749399120
This biography of George Orwell draws on a range of sources including letters concerning his romantic attachments to other boys at Eton, records which alter the conventional view of his military service, a detailed set of medical records and 200 letters and scripts discovered in 1984. Also included...
Orwell
AuthorD.J. Taylor
Winner of the 2004 Whitbread Prize for Biography

"D. J. Taylor has written not only the best recent biography of George Orwell . . . but also one of the cleverest studies of the relationship of that life to the written word."
-The Washington Post Book World

In the last fifty years,...
Essays in Idleness and Hôjôki
AuthorYoshida Kenkō
ISBN0141192100
These two works on life's fleeting pleasures are by Buddhist monks from medieval Japan, but each shows a different world-view. In the short memoir Hojoki, Chomei recounts his decision to withdraw from worldly affairs and live as a hermit in a tiny hut in the mountains, contemplating the impermanence...
A Life in Letters
AuthorGeorge Orwell
ISBN1846553555
George Orwell was a tireless and lively correspondent. He communicated with family members, friends and newspapers, figures such as Henry Miller, Cyril Connolly, Stephen Spender and Arthur Koestler, and strangers who wrote to him out of the blue. This carefully selected volume of his correspondence...
Is There a Text in This Class?: The Authority of Interpretive Communities
AuthorStanley Fish
ISBN0674467264
Stanley Fish is one of America's most stimulating literary theorists. In this book, he undertakes a profound reexamination of some of criticism's most basic assumptions. He penetrates to the core of the modern debate about interpretation, explodes numerous misleading formulations, and offers...
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