Noel Perrins Readers Delight
Discover Noel Perrin's Readers Delight—a curated list of captivating books that charm and inspire. Explore literary gems handpicked for devoted readers and book lovers.
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The Valleys of the Assassins
by Freya Stark
Hailed as a classic upon its first publication in 1934, The Valleys of the Assassins firmly established Freya Stark as one of her generation's most intrepid explorers. The book chronicles her travels into Luristan, the mountainous terrain nestled between Iraq and present-day Iran, often with only a single guide and on a shoestring budget. Stark writes engagingly of the nomadic peoples who inhabit the region's valleys and brings to life the stories of the ancient kingdoms of the Middle East, including that of the Lords of Alamut, a band of hashish-eating terrorists whose stronghold in the Elburz Mountains Stark was the first to document for the Royal Geographical Society. Her account is at once a highly readable travel narrative and a richly drawn, sympathetic portrait of a people told from their own compelling point of view. This edition includes a new Introduction by Jane Fletcher Geniesse, Stark's biographer.
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Love
by Stendhal
In 1818, when he was in his mid-thirties, Stendhal met and fell passionately in love with the beautiful Mathilde Dembowski. She, however, was quick to make it clear that she did not return his affections, and in his despair he turned to the written word to exorcise his love and explain his feelings. The result is an intensely personal dissection of the process of falling - and being - in love: a unique blend of poetry, anecdote, philosophy, psychology and social observation. Bringing together the conflicting sides of his nature, the deeply emotional and the coolly analytical, Stendhal created a work that is both acutely personal and universally applicable.
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Guard of Honor
by James Gould Cozzens
Guard of Honor is a neglected masterpiece that stands comparison with the greatest novels of the Second World War--essayist Noel Perrin deemed it "probably the best war novel of the twentieth century." James Gould Cozzens's Guard of Honor won the Pulitzer Prize in 1949. The novel balances a vast cast of intricately enmeshed characters as they react over the course of three tense days in September 1943 to a racial incident on a U.S. Army airbase in Florida. The reader is acutely aware of the war raging abroad and the effect it has had, or will have, on the multitude of servicemen who populate Cozzens's immense canvas. As Noel Perrin commented in The Washington Post Book World: "There is material for two or three hundred movies in Guard of Honor." "No other American novelist of our time writes with such profound understanding of the wellsprings of human character and of the social pressures that help to form it," said Orville Prescott in The New York Times. As Brendan Gill observed in The New Yorker "Every page of Guard of Honor gives the impression of a writer at the very top of his powers setting out to accomplish nothing less than his masterwork."
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The Silver Stallion
by James Branch Cabell
A humorous historical novel, set in a fictional French province during the Middle Ages. The novel describes the power struggles between the various rulers of the province.
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Far Rainbow
by Arkady Strugatsky
"We all know what Rainbow is," began Lamondois. "Rainbow is a planet colonized by science and designed for physical experiments." "The Far Rainbow was written at one breath, it is full of dynamics and genuine dramatism." - Literary Gazette "Science-fiction stories by the Strugatsky brothers are philosophical pieces. They are full of action but each action is clearly imbued with speculation."- Neva Magazine "Take the Far Rainbow, for instance. 'Authentic' is the word, and this is rather unusual where science fiction is concerned." - The Young Guard Magazine The brothers Boris and Arkady Strugatsky have chosen different careers. Arkady is a linguist and Boris an astronomer. Perhaps it is this divergence of interest which has helped them to describe the world of the far future so vividly. The brothers Strugatsky are among the most prominent Soviet science-fiction writers. They have written a number of works in the genre.