Anthologies

Everyone has their favourite passages in books in which the author throws narrative to the winds and breaks into sheer enumeration - food, memories, places, things, describing all the contents of the world. This selection of the best lists in literature, from Homer to the present day is the second book in this series. International in scope, it invites readers to enjoy the subtlety of these eccentric works and to wonder what it is that makes these grammarless treasures of language so attractive.

Ice is a riveting collection of writing about polar exploration -- stories of self-sacrifice, beauty, and heroism by eminent adventurers who have endured 50-below-zero temperatures, gale winds, and starvation to explore the farthest reaches of the globe. Robert Scott's journals recount his long march to and from the South Pole, which ends with the death of all his men and Scott himself. Ernest Shackleton offers an account of his heroic efforts to save his men when their ship was crushed by ice thousands of miles from civilization. Richard Byrd writes of his own near-breakdown under the stress of spending a winter alone at the South Pole.

"The Antarctic" features an international mix of classic first-person accounts of exploration, literary travelogues and works of cultural history, natural science and fiction about the South Pole. Contributors include British, American, Australian, Scandinavian, Japanese and Russian explorers such as Ernest Shackleton, Apsely Cherry-Garrard, Robert Falcon Scott, Roald Amundsen, Richard Byrd and Fouglas Mawson; novelists such as H.P. Lovecraft, Diane Ackerman, Jenny Diski and Kim Stanley Robinson and popular travel writers such as Sara Wheeler. It is published alongside the companion volume, "The Arctic: An Anthology", edited by Elizabeth Kolbert.