Fortunate and Unfortunate Travellers
Explore curated reads on fortune and misfortune—from Orwell's *Down and Out in Paris and London* to Céline's *Journey to the End of the Night*. Discover fiction and travelogues of luck, loss, and the open road.
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The Atlas
by William T. Vollmann
Arranged as a huge thematic palindrome, The Atlas showcases Vollmann's ability to build strange structures, sonnets composed of stories instead of words.
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Angels
by Denis Johnson
The most critically acclaimed, and first, of Denis Johnson's novels, Angels puts Jamie Mays -- a runaway wife toting along two kids -- and Bill Houston -- ex-Navy man, ex-husband, ex-con -- on a Greyhound Bus for a dark, wild ride cross country. Driven by restless souls, bad booze, and desperate needs, Jamie and Bill bounce from bus stations to cheap hotels as they ply the strange, fascinating, and dangerous fringe of American life. Their tickets may say Phoenix, but their inescapable destination is a last stop marked by stunning violence and mind-shattering surprise. Denis Johnson, known for his portraits of America's dispossessed, sets off literary pyrotechnics on this highway odyssey, lighting the trek with wit and a personal metaphysics that defiantly takes on the world.
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The Air-conditioned Nightmare
by Henry Miller
His stories and essays celebrate those rare individuals (famous and obscure) whose creative resilience and mere existence oppose the mechanization of minds and souls.
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Down and Out in Paris and London
by George Orwell
The adventures of a broke British writer as he works as a dishwasher in Paris and stays in homeless shelters in London.
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Journey to the End of the Night
by Louis-Ferdinand Céline
A nihilistic petit-bougeois named Bardamu opens his medical practice in the slums of suburban Paris.
