Showing results by author "Paul Theroux" in All Categories

Everyone in Cape Cod thinks that Mother is a wonderful woman: pious, hardworking, frugal. Everyone except her husband and seven children. To them she is a selfish and petty tyrant, endlessly comparing her many living children to the one who died in childbirth, keeping a viselike hold on her offspring even as they try to escape into adulthood. Welcome to Mother Land: a suffocating kingdom of parental narcissism.

A young American walks into Sicily's Palazzo d'Oro during the '60s. Penniless, but swaggering with youth and burgeoning artistic talent, he accepts a proposition to become the companion to a beautiful and beguiling aristocrat. Their affair—formal and restrained by day, torrid and passionate by night—leads him to a place where nothing, not even his lover, is what it seems. This novella and three other tales explore the underbelly of sexual desire and together make up one of Paul Theroux's most compelling works yet.

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.

Brought to you by Penguin. A deliciously dark, atmospheric novel about family and brotherhood from one of America's most distinctive writers There's sibling rivalry and then there's the relationship of brothers Cal and Frank Belanger, which takes fraternal antipathy to a whole new level. Enemies...

Brought to you by Penguin. Canada – ‘The true north strong and free’ in the words of its national anthem – is the subject of this exhilarating new travel book from Paul Theroux: both a journey into the past and a cross-country road trip in the present, at a pivotal point in Canada's...

It's 1960s America, and Herbie Gneiss is forced to leave college to get a job. Mr. Gibbon, a patriotic veteran of three wars, works with Herbie at Kant-Brake toy factory. When Herbie is drafted, Mr. Gibbon feels that he, too, should do something for his country; and so he decides to rob the Mount Holly Trust Company....