Original Letters from India
10 best books like Original Letters from India (Eliza Fay): The Way of the World, Letters from Russia, The Spring of My Life and Selected Haiku, An African in Greenland, The Shape of the Journey: New & Collected Poems, History of My Life, Vols. I & II, South from Granada: A Sojourn in Southern Spain, Flaubert in Egypt: A Sensibility on Tour, Stones of Aran: Pilgrimage, Voltaire in Love
In 1953, twenty-four-year old Nicolas Bouvier and his artist friend Thierry Vernet set out to make their way overland from their native Geneva to the Khyber Pass. They had money to last them a few months and a Fiat to take them where they were going, but above all they were equipped with the certainty that...
| Author | Astolphe de Custine |
| ISBN | 0940322811 |
The Marquis de Custine's record of his trip to Russia in 1839 is a brilliantly perceptive, even prophetic, account of one of the world's most fascinating and troubled countries. It is also a wonderful piece of travel writing. Custine, who met with people in all walks of life, including the Czar himself,...
| Author | Kobayashi Issa |
| ISBN | 1570621446 |
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...
| Author | Tété-Michel Kpomassie |
| ISBN | 0940322889 |
Tété-Michel Kpomassie was a teenager in Togo when he discovered a book about Greenland—and knew that he must go there. Working his way north over nearly a decade, Kpomassie finally arrived in the country of his dreams. This brilliantly observed and superbly entertaining record of his adventures...
| Author | Jim Harrison |
| ISBN | 1556590954 |
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...
| Author | Giacomo Casanova |
| ISBN | 0801856620 |
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 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...
| Author | Gustave Flaubert |
| ISBN | 0140435824 |
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...
Tim Robinson’s epic exploration of the desolate, storm-lashed, limestone rocks, which have already haunted generations of Irish writers, takes the form of a clockwise journey around the coast. Every cliff, inlet and headland reveals layers of myth and historical memory, and Robinson makes beautifully...
| Author | Nancy Mitford |
| ISBN | 0786706414 |
In 1733, the lovely, intelligent, and married Marquise du Châtelet commenced her romance with one François-Marie Arouet, a philosophe who had made a name for himself as "Voltaire." Mitford deftly and engagingly recounts their exemplary affair, whether in studious exile in the country, on the...
| Author | Béla Zombory-Moldován |
| ISBN | 1590178092 |
Publishing during the 100th Anniversary of World War I
An NYRB Classics Original
The budding young Hungarian artist Béla Zombory-Moldován was abroad on holiday when World War I broke out in August 1914. Called up by the army, he soon found himself hundreds of miles away, advancing...
| Author | Elizabeth Hardwick |
| ISBN | 0940322781 |
The novelist and essayist Elizabeth Hardwick is one of contemporary America's most brilliant writers, and Seduction and Betrayal, in which she considers the careers of women writers as well as the larger question of the presence of women in literature, is her most passionate and concentrated work...
| Author | Charles Duff |
| ISBN | 0940322676 |
A Handbook on Hanging is a Swiftian tribute to that unappreciated mainstay of civilization: the hangman. With barbed insouciance, Charles Duff writes not only of hanging but of electrocution, decapitations, and gassings; of innocent men executed and of executions botched; of the bloodlust of mobs...
| Author | Edmund Wilson |
| ISBN | 1590170938 |
Hecate is the Greek goddess of sorcery, and Edmund Wilson's Hecate County is the bewitched center of the American Dream, a sleepy bedroom community where drinks flow endlessly and sexual fantasies fill the air. Memoirs of Hecate County, Wilson's favorite among his many books, is a set of interlinked...
| Author | Janet Hobhouse |
| ISBN | 1590170857 |
Sirene
Le Furie di Janet Hobhouse, è “un romanzo intimamente autobiografico”, affascinante nella prima parte - perché la famiglia di lei è ebreo tedesca arrivata a New York nella metà dell’Ottocento - spregiudicata nella seconda, quando l’autrice ha circa vent’anni...
| Author | Caroline Blackwood |
| ISBN | 1590170067 |
Corrigan is at once a mordant comedy of manners and a very modern morality play. Since her husband's death, the increasingly frail Mrs. Blunt has had only her trips to his grave to look forward to. Her raucous housekeeper's conversation, and cooking, are best forgotten. Nadine, her daughter, is an infrequent,...
| Author | Sybille Bedford |
| ISBN | 0141188057 |
The Kaiser's Germany is the setting of Sybille Bedford's first and best-known novel, in which two families -- one from solid, upholstered Jewish Berlin, the other from the somnolent, agrarian Catholic South -- become comically, tragically, irrevocably intertwined. "Each family," writes the author,...
When the World Spoke French
| Author | Marc Fumaroli |
| ISBN | 1590173759 |
“Conceived as ‘a portrait gallery of foreigners conquered by Enlightenment France,’ Fumaroli’s book provides biographical essays about diverse and fascinating cast of characters. He depicts them all as wonderfully distinct individuals—real people whose eclectic interests, messy...
| Author | Alice Herdan-Zuckmayer |
| ISBN | 0933050461 |
The Farm in the Green Mountains is the story of a family finding home halfway across the world from their homeland.
Alice Herdan-Zuckmayer and her husband, the playwright Carl Zuckmayer, lived at the heart of intellectual life in Weimar, Germany, counting among their circle Stefan Zweig, Alma...
| Author | Emmett Grogan |
| ISBN | 0806511680 |
"Ringolevio" is the memorable tale of Emmett Grogan and the Diggers, the irreverent urban guerrillas anti masters and masters of street theater who made San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury a home, putting on Grateful Dead dances in Golden Gate Park, ladling out free stew to all comers in the park's Panhandle,...
| Author | J.R. Ackerley |
| ISBN | 0940322250 |
In the 1920s, the young J. R. Ackerley spent several months in India as the personal secretary to the maharajah of a small Indian principality. In his journals, Ackerley recorded the Maharajah's fantastically eccentric habits and riddling conversations, and the odd shambling day-to-day life of...
| Author | S. Josephine Baker |
| ISBN | 1590177061 |
New York’s Lower East Side was said to be the most densely populated square mile on earth in the 1890s. Health inspectors called the neighborhood “the suicide ward.” Diarrhea epidemics raged each summer, killing thousands of children. Sweatshop babies with smallpox and typhus dozed in garment...
| Author | Patrick Leigh Fermor |
| ISBN | 1590173805 |
In the late 1940s Patrick Leigh Fermor, now widely regarded as one of the twentieth century’s greatest travel writers, set out to explore the then relatively little-visited islands of the Caribbean. Rather than a comprehensive political or historical study of the region, The Traveller’s Tree,...
The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian is an astonishing work of self-discovery and the revelation of a peerless and provocative sensibility. Describing his childhood in the Bengali countryside and his youth in Calcutta—and telling the story of modern India from his own fiercely independent...
| Author | Aleksander Wat |
| ISBN | 1590170652 |
In My Century the great Polish poet Aleksander Wat provides a spellbinding account of life in Eastern Europe in the midst of the terrible twentieth century. Based on interviews with Nobel Prize winner Czeslaw Milosz, My Century describes the artistic, sexual, and political experimentation --in...
