Bücher der Reihe Vintage Departures

Richard Holmes knew he had become a true biographer the day his bank bounced a check that he had inadvertently dated 1772. Because for the acclaimed chronicler of Shelley and Coleridge, biography is a physical pursuit, an ardent and arduous retracing of footsteps that may have vanished centuries before. In this gripping book, Holmes takes us from France's Massif Central, where he followed the route taken by Robert Louis Stevenson and a sweet-natured donkey, to Mary Wollstonecraft's Revolutionary Paris, to the Italian villages where Percy Shelley tried to cast off the strictures of English morality and marriage. Footsteps is a wonderful exploration of the ties between biographers and their subjects, filled with passion and revelations. "Deeply impressive . . . Footsteps is a singular event in the modern history of biography, and in itself a delightful reading experience."-Alfred Kazin "This exhilarating book, part biography, part autobiography, shows the biographer as sleuth and huntsman, tracking his subjects through space and time."-The Observer "A modern masterpiece . . . [Holmes is] the most romantic of contemporary biographers and probably the most revolutionary in spirit and form."-Michael Holroyd, author of Bernard Shaw

A salty story of friendship, adventure, and the explosive life that teems beneath the ocean The Lofoten archipelago, just North of the Arctic Circle, is a place of unsurpassed beautythe skyline spikes with dramatic peaks; the radiant greens and purples of the Northern Lights follow summers where the sun never sets. It's a place of small villages, where the art of fishing, though evolving, is still practiced in traditional ways. Beneath the great depths surrounding these islands lurks the infamous Greenland shark. At twenty-four feet in length and weighing more than a ton, it is truly a beast to behold. But the shark is not known just for its size: Its meat contains a toxin that, when consumed, has been known to make people drunk and hallucinatory.Shark Drunkis the true story of two friends, the author and the eccentric artist Hugo Aasjord, as they embark on a wild pursuit of the famed creatureall from a tiny rubber boat. Together they tackle existential questions and encounter the world's most powerful maelstrom as they attempt to understand the ocean from every possible angle, drawing on poetry, science, history, ecology, mythology, and their ownsometimes intoxicatedobservations, meanwhile pursuing the elusive Greenland shark. By turns thrilling, wise, and hilarious, Shark Drunk is a celebration of adventure, marine life, and, above all, friendship.Winner of the Norwegian Brage Prize 2015Winner of the Norwegian Critics' Prize for Literature 2015Winner of the Norwegian Reine Ord Prize at Lofoten International Literature Festival 2016

In his latest tour of the earth's remote, exotic, and dismal places, the author of Road Fever and A Wolverine Is Eating My Leg sleeps with a grizzly bear, witnesses demonic possession in Bali, and survives a run-in with something called the Throne of Doom in Guatemala. Vivid and outrageously funny.

The author of Video Night in Kathmandu ups the ante on himself in this sublimely evocative and acerbically funny tour through the world's loneliest and most eccentric places. From Iceland to Bhutan to Argentina, Iyer remains both uncannily observant and hilarious.

Irreverent, poignant, and revealing, this meditation on the sweet temptation of wealth and the vainglorious quest for paradise as they exist in Aspen, Colorado, features a "cast of characters (that) includes such barn-size satirical targets as exclusive health clubs, over-the-hill drug dealers and movie stars and rock stars of wattages bright and dim" (The New Republic).