"From legendary writer Paul Theroux comes an atmospheric novel following a big-wave surfer as he confronts aging, privilege, mortality, and whose lives we choose to remember"-- Now in his sixties, big-wave surfer Joe Sharkey has passed his prime and is losing his 'stoke.' The younger surfers around the breaks on the north shore of Oahu still idolize the Shark, but his sponsors are looking elsewhere. Driving home from a bar after one too many, Joe...

The world's most acclaimed travel writer journeys through western Africa from Cape Town to the Congo.

"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...

"A delectable collection of Theroux's recent writing on great places, people, and prose"--

Paul Theroux's first collection of essays and articles devoted entirely to travel writing, Fresh Air Fiend touches down on five continents and floats through most seas in between to deliver a literary adventure of the first order, with the incomparable Paul Theroux as a guide. From the crisp quiet of a solitary week spent in the snowbound Maine woods to the expectant chaos of Hong Kong on the eve of the Hand-over. Theroux demonstrates how the traveling...

"[Hock] knows he is ensorcelled by exoticism, but he can't help himself. And, as things go from bad to worse and the pages start to turn faster, neither can we. A."—Entertainment Weekly
When he was a young man, Ellis Hock spent four of the best years of his life with the Peace Corps in Malawi. So when his wife of forty-two years leaves him, he decides to return to the village where he was stationed in search of the happiness...

In this wickedly satiric romp, Paul Theroux captures the essence of Hawaii as it has never been depicted. The novel's narrator, a down-on-his-luck writer, escapes to Waikiki and soon finds himself the manager of the Hotel Honolulu, a low-rent establishment a few blocks off the beach. Honeymooners, vacationers, wanderers, mythomaniacs, soldiers, and families all check in to the hotel. Like the Canterbury pilgrims, every guest has come in search of...

From the legendary American master Paul Theroux comes a brilliant new novel of chilling psychological depth, the tale of a younger brother whose lifelong rivalry with his older brother-a powerful lawyer with a pattern of gleefully vicious betrayals-culminates in the ultimate plan: murder. Cal has always lived in the shadow of his manipulative and domineering brother, Frank, who was doted upon by their mother and beloved by the girls in their small...

"A Vonnegut tinged absurdist satire . . . (a) tightly paced, expertly drawn comic romp" from the New York Times–bestselling author of The Mosquito Coast (LitReactor). Paul Theroux, one of the world's most popular authors, both for his travel books and his fiction, has produced an off-beat story of 1960s weirdos unlike anything he has ever written. During the time of Lyndon Johnson's presidency, Herbie Gneiss is forced to leave college to get...

Paul Theroux's first collection of essays and articles devoted entirely to travel writing, FRESH AIR FIEND touches down on five continents and floats through most seas in between to deliver a literary adventure of the first order, with the incomparable Paul Theroux as a guide. From the crisp quiet of a solitary week spent in the snowbound Maine woods to the expectant chaos of Hong Kong on the eve of the Hand-over, Theroux demonstrates how the traveling...