Jonathan Raban

It is no surprise that one of the earliest works in English literature should be a poem about the sea: the sea has been a source of fascination from the earliest times, and the Anglo-Saxon poem 'The Seafarer' is only the first in a long series of writings which ponder its mystery. A powerful and restless presence in real life, the sea is one of the most ubiquitous and protean symbols in literature, changing in response to shifts in sensibility, and holding a mirror to all who confront it - Renaissance explorers and Augustan gentlemen, Romantic outcasts and Victorian travellers, small-boat sailors, naturalists and novelists, poets and oceanographers: men and women in a state of wonder before the sea. Jonathan Raban brings a special awareness and knowledge to his role as editor; in the words of Colin Thubron, 'nobody of his generation writes more subtly or imaginatively on travel'. Raban's introduction constitutes an important essay on the meaning of the sea in literature, and the pieces he has chosen display the exhilarating richness of writing in the tradition. Alongside extracts from the acknowledged marine masterpieces are many unexpected delights: Emily Dickinson's affirmative poem 'Exhalation is the Going'; a meditation on a seaside holiday by Larkin; Jane Austen's tart satirizing of Byron's Romanticized sea; Thoreau's contemplation of monsters and lost anchors off Cape Cod; Willard Bascom's brilliantly observed description of breaking waves. As richly varied and enthralling as the sea itself, this sparkling collection spans the centuries from AD 900 to the present and forms a unique and important body of writing to delight in and admire.

The bestselling, award-winning author of Bad Land takes us along the Inside Passage, 1,000 miles of often treacherous water, which he navigates solo in a 35-foot sailboat, offering captivating discourses on art, philosophy, and navigation and an unsparing narrative of personal loss. "A work of great beauty and inexhaustible fervor." --The Washington Post Book World With the same rigorous observation (natural and social), invigorating stylishness, and encyclopedic learning that he brought to his National Book Award-winning Bad Land, Jonathan Raban conducts readers along the Inside Passage from Seattle to Juneau. But Passage to Juneau also traverses a gulf of centuries and cultures: the immeasurable divide between the Northwest's Indians and its first European explorers--between its embattled fishermen and loggers and its pampered new class.

A New York Times Notable Book "In an era of jet tourism, Jonathan Raban] remains a traveler-adventurer in the tradition of . . . Robert Louis Stevenson." --The New York Times Book Review In 1782 an immigrant with the high-toned name J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur--"Heartbreak" in English--wrote a pioneering account of one European's transformation into an American. Some two hundred years later Jonathan Raban, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, arrived in Crevecoeur's wake to see how America has paid off for succeeding generations of newcomers. The result is an exhilarating, often deliciously funny book that is at once a travelogue, a social history, and a love letter to the United States. In the course of Hunting Mr. Heartbreak, Raban passes for homeless in New York and tries to pass for a good ol' boy in Alabama (which entails "renting" an elderly black lab). He sees the Protestant work ethic perfected by Korean immigrants in Seattle--one of whom celebrates her new home as "So big So green So wide-wide-wide "--and repudiated by the lowlife of Key West. And on every page of this peerlessly observant work, Raban makes us experience America with wonder, humor, and an unblinking eye for its contradictions. "Raban delivers himself of some of the most memorable prose ever written about urban America." --Henry Kisor, Chicago Sun-Times "When Raban describes America and Americans, he is unfailingly witty and entertaining." --Salman Rushdie

The bestselling, award-winning author of Bad Land realizes a lifelong dream as he navigates the waters of the Mississippi River in a sixteen-foot motorboat, producing yet another masterpiece of contemporary American travel writing. "Stunning." --The New York Times Book ReviewIn the course of his voyage, Raban records the mercurial caprices of the river and the astonishingly varied lives of the people who live along its banks. Whether he is fishing for walleye or hunting coon, discussing theology in Prairie Du Chien or race relations in Memphis, he is an expert observer of the heartyland's estrangement from America's capitals ot power and culture, and its helpless nostalgia for its lost past. Witty, elegaic, and magnificently erudite, Old Glory is as filled with strong currents as the Mississippi itself.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER - NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER - Startlingly observed, beautifully written, this book is a contemporary classic of the American West. - "As good a book as I have read about rural America in a very long time." --The New York Times Book ReviewIn 1909 maps still identified eastern Montana as the Great American Desert. But in that year Congress, lobbied heavily by railroad companies, offered 320-acre tracts of land to anyone bold or foolish enough to stake a claim to them. Drawn by shamelessly inventive brochures, countless homesteaders--many of them immigrants--went west to make their fortunes. Most failed. In Bad Land, Jonathan Raban travels through the unforgiving country that was the scene of their dreams and undoing, and makes their story come miraculously alive. In towns named Terry, Calypso, and Ismay (which changed its name to Joe, Montana, in an effort to attract football fans), and in the landscape in between, Raban unearths a vanished episode of American history, with its own ruins, its own heroes and heroines, its own hopeful myths and bitter memories.

Coasting is half travel book, half autobiography, half novel (never mind the arithmetic), marvellously written and superbly constructed. The author's intention was surely to sail through time and place, to chart the coastline of his own past, to take soundings of his future, while bobbing around the edges of Britain...The result is a triumph, and should be read for its evocation of childhood and awkward adolescence, its portrayal of his father, its descriptions of places and sunsets, of incidents and accidents. In short a writer's view of England and the English, including himself. It's the sort of book you put among your favourite books you keep on your desk or table, the ones you pick up over and over again to re-read with undiminished pleasure, the sort you wish you'd written yourself' Beryl Bainbridge, Spectator

‘A wonderful, rushing, crowded, enlightening voyage . . . A book which, in its ingenious understanding, its acceptance of a very imperfect world, and its energetic and constant fascination with human variety, should do a great deal to dispel the easiest and therefore the most prolific paranoid deception which the Western imagination has now fabricated in its desperate attempt to avoid facing reality’ Angus Wilson, Observer ‘A gem of a book, full of events and people and philosophy’ Sunday Telegraph‘With an eye for the striking scene and entertaining incident he combines a perceptiveness of deeper realities that makes Arabia more than an amusing travellers’ journal’ Daily Telegraph‘A very enjoyable book . . . It is racy and entertaining travel writing’ Cosmopolitan‘The advent of a new travel writer of the first rank is an occasion to celebrate. Such a discovery is Jonathan Raban, whose Arabia is a tour de force’ Yorkshire Post

A stunning success...Raban takes us floating through the heart of America...more successful than 99% of the books about America since De Tocqueville's Democracy in America' New York Times 'Mr Raban has a keen ear, but, for the river itself, he has to evince not only a keen eye but a capacity to use a painter's palette. He gives us the strong brown god in all its rage, sullenness and beauty' Anthony Burgess, Observer 'This is a fascinating and enchanting book. It is never dull, and yet there are facts aplenty to be picked up on the way. I enjoyed every mile of the journey' Evening Standard