Sea Essays

Often called “Little Genesis,” The Book of Jubilees retells the story of Genesis with dramatic expansions, calendar reform, and heavenly insight. This modern edition presents the full text in clear, readable English—paired with in-depth essays and historical commentary to help modern readers understand its theological, political, and cultural impact. This is a brand new modern English Translation in Large Print. (16 pt font) This complete edition includes: A fully modernized translation of Jubilees in easy-to-read prose Detailed commentary on major themes: angelology, sacred calendars...

The exhilarating true story of Trudy Ederle, the first woman to swim the English Channel, and inspire a “wave of confidence and emancipation” for women in sports (Parade). By age twenty, at the height of the Jazz Age, Trudy Ederle was the most accomplished swimmer in the world. She’d won...

Langston Hughes, born in 1902, came of age early in the 1920s. In The Big Sea he recounts those memorable years in the two great playgrounds of the decade--Harlem and Paris. In Paris he was a cook and waiter in nightclubs. He knew the musicians and dancers, the drunks and dope fiends. In Harlem...

An ambitious memoir in essays by beloved bestselling author Reyna Grande that illuminates the hidden cost of the American Dream and the complex journey of healing that follows survival. What is the true power of stories? Can they heal the jagged edges of a traumatic childhood? Is the cost of...

A luminous, deeply felt collection of essays from Riverhorse Nakadate—angler, musician, conservationist, and lifelong nomad—whose devotion to wild places and the healing power of water pulses through every page. For readers of Edward Abbey, Barry Lopez, Mary Oliver, and Jim Harrison, this...

The author of The Great Railway Bazaar explores the South Pacific by kayak: “This exhilarating epic ranks with [his] best travel books” (Publishers Weekly). In one of his most exotic and adventuresome journeys, travel writer Paul Theroux embarks on an eighteen-month tour of the South Pacific...

A children's book that adults have not been able to stop reading for a hundred and forty years — because it was never really a children's book. This Erato Press critical edition reads Treasure Island as the serious, strange, and morally unsettling novel it actually is. In the summer of 1881, on a rainy morning in the Scottish Highlands, Robert Louis Stevenson drew a map to amuse his thirteen-year-old stepson. The map showed an island with bays and hills and a swamp, with names invented as he went: Skeleton Island, Spy-glass Hill, the Hispaniola. Stevenson stared at the finished map and ...

A “brilliant and provocative” (The New Yorker) celebration of Melville’s masterpiece—from the bestselling author of In the Heart of the Sea, Valiant Ambition, and In the Hurricane's Eye One of the greatest American novels finds its perfect contemporary champion in Why Read Moby-Dick?...

The heart-stopping memoir, soon to be a major motion picture starring Shailene Woodley and Sam Claflin, and directed by Baltasar Kormákur (Everest). Young and in love, their lives ahead of them, Tami Oldham and her fiancé Richard Sharp set sail from Tahiti under brilliant blue skies, with...

One of the founding works of modern science fiction — and one of the greatest adventure novels ever written. In 1866, ships of every nation begin to sink in deep ocean. A monstrous creature — vast, phosphorescent, faster than any vessel — is glimpsed in the waters of the world. The American government sends out the frigate Abraham Lincoln to hunt it down. On board: the French marine biologist Pierre Aronnax, his servant Conseil, and the Canadian harpooner Ned Land. What they find is not a creature. It is a submarine — the Nautilus — captained by a brilliant, embittered, ...

When ten-year-old Enaiatollah Akbari’s small village in Afghanistan falls prey to Taliban rule in early 2000, his mother shepherds the boy across the border into Pakistan but has to leave him there all alone to fend for himself. Thus begins Enaiat’s remarkable and often punish­ing five-year...

A book to sweep you away from the shore, into a wild world of water, whale, storm, and starlight ― to experience what it’s like to sail for weeks at a time with life set to a new rhythm. As a young girl, Hannah Stowe was raised at the tide’s edge on the Pembrokeshire coast of Wales...

The greatest American novel ever written about obsession, the sea, and the thing that cannot be caught. This annotated edition includes an original critical essay and a full biography of Herman Melville. Herman Melville published Moby Dick in 1851 to near-total indifference. The reviews were mixed, the sales were poor, and Melville — who had poured everything he knew about whaling, philosophy, the Bible, and the darkness of the human will into 600 pages — spent the rest of his life in obscurity. He died in 1891 almost completely forgotten. Thirty years later, scholars rediscovered the ...

Fictional? Authoritative? Fantastic? Deadpan? Investigations into the real, the true...and the things that should be true....

A travelogue of visits to islands across the globe, from remote Fijian islands to the Lofoten Islands above the Arctic Circle. David Canford comes face to face with sea snakes and meets a man whose great grandfather ate humans. He also learns the stingray shuffle on an uninhabited Mexican island, follows in the footsteps of movie stars in the Greek islands, explores Corsica, goes searching for killer whales in the San Juan Islands on the US-Canadian border, finds how to avoid the crowds on the hundred-plus islands that make up Venice, and discovers unspoiled islands off the coast of England.

Written by a marine scientist (and winner of French eloquence competitions), this work of narrative nonfiction blends Bill François’ personal story with that of sea creatures to create an original and exciting work. In poetic prose, he describes his unlikely journey from being a Parisian child, afraid of the water and crippled by self-consciousness, to an eloquent and self-assured young man with a passion for the ocean and all who inhabit it.

From the award-winning, New York Times best-selling author of Cod and Salt, To Catch a Fish is an entertaining and beautifully written illustrated collection of essays that explore a lifetime fascination with fishing. For as long as there have been humans, there have been humans trying to catch...

Five men fall from the sky onto an uninhabited island with nothing but the clothes on their backs. Within three years they have rebuilt civilization from scratch — bricks, glass, iron, nitroglycerin, a telegraph, a hydraulic elevator. Then the volcano beneath their feet begins to wake. This Erato Press critical edition reads The Mysterious Island as Jules Verne's most ambitious novel: not the boys' adventure its surface suggests, but an elegy for the Enlightenment project of rational mastery — and the most serious question Verne ever asked about what knowledge can and cannot do. ...

Imagine a boardinghouse in the days when the Civil War was still a decade in the future, in which an erudite, polished, witty, sophisticated, learned gentleman holds forth each day at breakfast, entertaining the boarders with fascinating talk: observations on people and nature, occasional flights of verse, remarks on current events, moralizations and philosophical thoughts, and anything else that comes to his mind.

Some of the greatest names in naval history, Admiral Horatio Nelson, commodore Stephen Decatur, Admiral Erich Raeder, and many others fill War at Sea in a way that not only educates but entertains any listener interested in the story of naval warfare. From the Chesapeake Bay to Jutland, from the River Plate to Guadalcanal, from Hampton Roads to Leyte Gulf, here are the most compelling and memorable accounts of the days of sail and steam, of wood and iron, and of duels to the death on the waters.