From Atlantis to Xanadu and beyond, this Baedeker of make-believe takes readers on a tour of more than 1,200 realms invented by storytellers from Homer's day to our own. Here you will find Shangri-La and El Dorado; Utopia and Middle Earth; Wonderland and Freedonia. Here too are Jurassic Park, Salman Rushdie's Sea of Stories, and the fabulous world of Harry Potter. The history and behavior of the inhabitants of these lands are described in loving detail, and are supplemented by more than 200 maps and illustrations that depict the lay of the land in a host of elsewheres. A must-have for the...

This book represents the best of the nature-writing genre in over three dozenworks from the past three centuries.

This collection includes: How Wand-fo was Saved, Marko's Smile, The Milk of Death, The Last Love of Princess Genji, The Man Who Loved the Nereids, Our Lady of the Swallows, Aphrodissia; the Widow, Kali Beheaded, The End of Marko Kraljevic, The Sadness of Cornelius Berg, and a Postscript by the Author.

"From China to Japan, the Balkans to India, Oriental Tales addresses love, conquest, betrayal, murder, religion, and passion in an eloquent and exquisite telling."--Kirkus Reviews.

For almost a century and a half, Bulfinch's Mythology has been the text by which the great tales of the gods and goddesses, Greek and Roman antiquity; Scandinavian, Celtic, and Oriental fables and myths; and the age of chivalry have been known.
The stories are divided into three sections: The Age of Fable or Stories of Gods and Heroes (first published in 1855); The Age of Chivalry (1858), which contains King Arthur and His Knights, The Mabinogeon, and The Knights of English History; and Legends of Charlemagne or Romance of the Middle Ages (1863). For the Greek myths, Bulfinch drew on...

This profoundly illuminating, entertaining book could well change the way we "read" the visual world around us, and certainly help open our eyes and minds to its astonishing riches. The language in which we speak about art has become steadily more abstruse, a jargon that only art critics and con-artists can understand, though for thousands of years this was not the case. Today, we live in a kaleidoscopic new world of images: Is there a vocabulary we can learn in order to read these images? Is there something we can do so as not to remain passive when we flip through an illustrated book, or...

"This delightful book provides readers a key to more than one secret room of Borges's magical worlds."--Mahmoud Darwish
"Alberto Manguel is to reading what Casanova was to sex."--"Scotland on Sunday"
"His stories about Borges . . . [are] wrapped in luminous poetry."--"The Toronto Star"
Winner of the 2003 Prix du livre en Poitou-Charentes.
In 1964, in Buenos Aires, a blind writer in his sixties approached a sixteen-year-old bookstore clerk and asked if he would be interested in a part-time job reading aloud. The writer was Jorge Luis Borges, one of the world's finest...

Since his first voyage, as a sailor earning his passage from his native Holland to South America, Cees Nooteboom has never stopped traveling.Now his best travel pieces are gathered in this collection of immense range and depth, informed throughout by the author's humanity and gentle humor. From exotic places such as Isfahan, Gambia, and Mali to seemingly domesticated places such as Australia and Munich, Nooteboom shares his view of the world, showing us the strangeness in places we thought we knew and the familiarity of places most of us will probably never see.
His phenomenal gifts as an...