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The Written Word

A List of Online Resources

Resources on Genre:

Colorado State University's Guide to Journaling

Colorado State University's Guide to Fiction

Colorado State University's Guide to Poetry

Creative Writing Prompts:

Use these creative writing prompts and creative writing ideas to create stories, poems and other creative pieces from your imagination. The writing prompts can even help you come up with creative content for blogs and blog stories.

Toasted Cheese: A by Writers for Writers site

Middlebury College Professor Barbara Ganley’s tips for When You’re Stuck and trying to write creatively. A great resource of exercises to overcome writers’ block, with writing exercises, like 5 minute stories, automatic writing and Idea and Image Jottings.

Writing Time: reading lists, creative writing exercises, and a nurturing writing community

Inspiration for Writers-What Writers have said about Writing: A list of quotations by accomplished writers about the process of writing. Also includes a list of musings about Fiction, short stories, and characters.

What Your Favorite Authors Have to Say:

Listen to your favorite authors talk about their writing online at Arm Chair Interviews

Listen to Authors in Your Pocket

William Zinsser, On Writing Well (for general approach to writing): recommended by Professor Eugene Hammond of the University of Maryland

The following are recommended by Professor Eugene Hammond of the
University of Maryland:

Lady Mary Wortley Montague’s Letters Written During Her Travels in
Europe, Asia, and Africa from the 18th century.

Eric Newby

The Old Patagonian Express by Paul Theroux

West with the Night (only marginally a travel book, but with a
usefully different style and approach to strange places from
Theroux’s) by Beryl Markham

The following are recommended by Professor Christine S. Cozzens,
Professor of English and director of the Center for Writing and
Speaking at Agnes Scott College (with contributions from her former
student Andrea Comiskey)

“Vindictively American" from Take the Cannoli by Sarah Vowell

Travel Writing (particularly Chapters 1 and 4) by Peat O’Neil
“The Very, Very, Very Big Chill” by Marcel Theroux

“Sea-Room” from The Best of Ganta Travel (London, 1991) by Jonathan
Raban

“The Place to Disappear” by Susan Orlean

The following is a Travel Writing Bibliography constructed about books with travel writing themes, contributed by Professor and Travel Writer Debra Marquart, of Iowa State University

Aciman, Andre. Letters of Transit: Reflections on Exile, Identity, Language, and Loss. (1999)
This collection of works by award winning writers-in-exile (Eva Hoffman, Bharati Mukherjee, Edward Said, Charles Simic, and Andre Aciman) shares meditations on exile, home, and memory.

Aciman, Andre. Out of Egypt, A Memoir. (1994)
Aciman presents a rich and captivating portrait of a Jewish family from cosmopolitan Alexandria, Egypt. From their arrival there at the turn of the century until their departure three generations later, the members of Aciman's clan experienced adventures and harrowing disappointments. Their stories are in many ways similar to those of other Jewish families in vanishing communities throughout the Middle East and North Africa. Most impressive among the siblings is Uncle Villy, who led a colorful life as a British spy, Italian fascist, and soldier. Aunt Flora, a refugee from Germany, maintains a rather pessimistic philosophy about life. With this memoir, the author in part redeems the social life, customs, and history of a community that barely exists today amid an inhospitable milieu, due to political turmoil in close and remote lands. This is not simply another nostalgic account but a well-written and touching depiction of life in a community that has almost ceased to be.

Alexander, Caroline. The Endurance: Shackleton’s Legendary Antarctic Expedition. (1998)
Melding superb research and the extraordinary expedition photography of Frank Hurley, The Endurance by Caroline Alexander is a stunning work of history, adventure, and art which chronicles "one of the greatest epics of survival in the annals of exploration." Setting sail as World War I broke out in Europe, the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition, led by renowned polar explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton, hoped to become the first to cross the Antarctic continent. But their ship, Endurance, was trapped in the drifting pack ice, eventually to splinter, leaving the expedition stranded on floes--a situation that seemed "not merely desperate but impossible." Most skillfully Alexander constructs the expedition's character through its personalities--the cast of veteran explorers, scientists, and crew--with aid from many previously unavailable journals and documents. We learn, for instance, that carpenter and shipwright Henry McNish, or "Chippy," was "neither sweet-tempered nor tolerant," and that Mrs. Chippy, his cat, was "full of character." Such firsthand descriptions, paired with 170 of Frank Hurley's intimate photographs, which are comprehensively assembled here for the first time, penetrate the hulls of the Endurance and these tough men. The account successfully reveals the seldom-seen domestic world of expedition life--the singsongs, feasts, lectures, camaraderie--so that when the hardships set in, we know these people beyond the stereotypical guise of mere explorers and long for their safety. Alexander reveals Shackleton as an inspiring optimist, "a leader who put his men first." Throughout the grueling ordeal, Shackleton and his men show what endurance and greatness are all about. The Endurance is a most intimate portrait of an expedition and of survival. Readers will possess a newfound respect for these daring souls, know better their unthinkable toil and half-forgotten realm of glory.

Almond, Steve. Candyfreak: A Journey Through the Chocolate Underbelly of America. (2005)
Picture a magical, sugar-fueled road trip with Willy Wonka behind the wheel and David Sedaris riding shotgun, complete with chocolate-stained roadmaps and the colorful confetti of spent candy wrappers flying in your cocoa powder dust. If you can imagine such a manic journey--better yet, if you can imagine being a hungry hitchhiker who's swept through America's forgotten candy meccas: Philadelphia (Peanut Chews), Sioux City (Twin Bing), Nashville (Goo Goo Cluster), Boise (Idaho Spud) and beyond--then Candyfreak: A Journey through the Chocolate Underbelly of America, Steve Almond's impossible-to-put down portrait of regional candy makers and the author's own obsession with all-things sweet, would be your Fodor's guide to this gonzo tour.

Ambrose, Stephen. Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West. (1996)
In this sweeping adventure story, historian Stephen Ambrose recreates a definitive portrait of one of the most momentous journeys in American history—the Lewis and Clark Expedition across the continent to find a Pacific waterway.

Atwood, Margaret. The Penelopiad: The Myth of Penelope and Odysseus (2005).
“But Homer’s Odyssey is not the only version of the story. Mythic material was originally oral, and also local – a myth would be told one way in one place and quite differently in another. I have drawn on material other than The Odyssey, especially for the details of Penelope’s parentage, her early life and marriage, and the scandalous rumors circulating about her.” (Atwood in the introduction)

Balint, Christine. The Salt Letters, a Novel. (2001)
In her first novel, Australian writer Balint tells the haunting story of a young woman's 1854 ocean passage from England to "New Holland" in sensuous and fiercely precise prose reminiscent of poet-novelist Anne Michaels. Though detailed in its description of the horrible conditions on immigrant ships, the narrative is less a historical novel than a lyrical rumination on the suffusing, diffusing and enveloping power of both water and memory. Her movements aboard ship restricted by disapproving Matron,who oversees the locked and crowded steerage quarters for unmarried women, Sarah Garnett begins numerous letters to her mother in Shropshire, but never gets farther than the few tantalizingly constrained words that begin each chapter. As the stories of the odd assortment of characters onboard begin to unfold, however, so do Sarah's memories, revealing a family history rife with strange secrets and even stranger women. There's Grandmother Frye, a bold sea-captain's wife who smelled so strongly of fish that she "salted the air around her," and Sarah's own mother, who passed on to Sarah the blueprint of a shameful family "pattern" descending from one generation of women to the next. Elliptical references to Sarah's cousin Richard gradually reveal that he is part of that family weakness; perhaps he is on board ship, having run away with Sarah. This is left teasingly ambiguous, for, as the ship languishes in the stultifying doldrums, Sarah's reminiscences and desires become increasingly fluid and fevered, and the line between her hulled-in present and her past eventually becomes indistinct. While Balint succeeds in conveying a young woman's physical and emotional anguish, sometimes her use of the water metaphor becomes overwrought. Yet the narrative is compelling, and keenly observed details bring immediacy to Balint's imaginative recreation of a harrowing experience.

Bouvier, Nicolas. The Scorpion-Fish (1988).Swedish photojournalist, author writes bizarre tale of fever in the South of India. Fiction. My favorite travel book (Kim).

Bowles, Paul. The Sheltering Sky. (1968)
American novelist and short-story writer, poet, translator, classical music composer, and filmscorer Paul Bowles has lived as an expatriate for more than 40 years in the North African nation of Morocco, a country that reaches into the vast and inhospitable Sahara Desert. The desert is itself a character in The Sheltering Sky, the most famous of Bowles' books, which is about three young Americans of the postwar generation who go on a walkabout into Northern Africa's own arid heart of darkness. In the process, the veneer of their lives is peeled back under the author's psychological inquiry.

Bryson, Bill. In a Sunburned Country. (2001)
With the Olympics approaching, books on Australia abound. Still, Bryson's lively take is a welcome recess from packaged, staid guides. The author of A Walk in the Woods draws readers in campfire-style, relating wacky anecdotes and random facts gathered on multiple trips down under, all the while lightening the statistics with infusions of whimsical humor. Arranged loosely by region, the book bounces between Canberra and Melbourne, the Outback and the Gold Coast, showing Bryson alone and with partners in tow. His unrelenting insistence that Australia is the most dangerous place on earth ("If you are not stung or pronged to death in some unexpected manner, you may be fatally chomped by sharks or crocodiles, or carried helplessly out to sea by irresistible currents, or left to stagger to an unhappy death in the baking outback") spins off dozens of tales involving jellyfish, spiders and the world's 10 most poisonous snakes. Pitfalls aside, Bryson revels in the beauty of this country, home to ravishing beaches and countless unique species ("80% of all that lives in Australia, plant and animal, lives nowhere else"). He glorifies the country, alternating between awe, reverence and fear, and he expresses these sentiments with frankness and candor, via truly funny prose and a conversational pace that is at once unhurried and captivating. Peppered with seemingly irrelevant (albeit amusing) yarns, this work is a delight to read, whether or not a trip to the continent is planned.

Byron, Robert. Phoenix, The Station. Athos: Treasures and Men. (1928)
At only 22 years of age, the author of the acclaimed Road to Oxiana traveled with his friends for the first time to Mount Athos in Greece. The eye-opening visit inspired a classic appraisal of its treasures and men--one that immediately established Byron as a major new talent. A deep love for Byzantine civilization and reverence for antiquity glow from every page. "It is a volume that will bear reading again and again.”

Byron, Robert. Road to Oxiana. (1937)
In 1933, the delightfully eccentric travel writer Robert Byron set out on a journey through the Middle East via Beirut, Jerusalem, Baghdad and Teheran to Oxiana, near the border between Afghanistan and the Soviet Union. Throughout, he kept a thoroughly captivating record of his encounters, discoveries, and frequent misadventures. His story would become a best-selling travel book throughout the English-speaking world, until the acclaim died down and it was gradually forgotten. When Paul Fussell published his own book Abroad, in 1982, he wrote that The Road to Oxiana is to the travel book what "Ulysses is to the novel between the wars, and what The Waste Land is to poetry." His statements revived the public's interest in the book, and for the first time, it was widely available in American bookstores. Now this long-overdue reprint will introduce it to a whole new generation of readers. This edition features a new introduction by Rory Stewart, best known for his book The Places In Between, about his extensive travels in Afghanistan. Today, in addition to its entertainment value, The Road to Oxiana also serves as a rare account of the architectural treasures of a region now inaccessible to most Western travelers, and a nostalgic look back at a more innocent time.

Calvino, Italo. Invisible Cities. (1975)
"Kublai Khan does not necessarily believe everything Marco Polo says when he describes the cities visited on his expeditions, but the emperor of the Tartars does continue listening to the young Venetian with greater attention and curiosity than he shows any other messenger or explorer of his." So begins Italo Calvino's compilation of fragmentary urban images. As Marco tells the khan about Armilla, which "has nothing that makes it seem a city, except the water pipes that rise vertically where the houses should be and spread out horizontally where the floors should be," the spider-web city of Octavia, and other marvelous burgs, it may be that he is creating them all out of his imagination, or perhaps he is recreating details of his native Venice over and over again, or perhaps he is simply recounting some of the myriad possible forms a city might take.

Capote, Truman. In Cold Blood. (1965)In Cold Blood was a groundbreaking work when released in 1966. With it, author Truman Capote contributed to a style of writing in which the reporter gets so far inside the subject, becomes so familiar, that he projects events and conversations as if he were really there. The style has probably never been accomplished better than in this book. Capote combined painstaking research with a narrative feel to produce one of the most spellbinding stories ever put on the page. Two two-time losers living in a lonely house in western Kansas are out to make the heist of their life, but when things don't go as planned, the robbery turns ugly. From there, the book is a real-life look into murder, prison, and the criminal mind.

Chatwin, Bruce. Anatomy of Restlessness: Selected Writing 1969-1989. (1996)
Chatwin (In Patagonia), who died in 1989 at 49, was a brilliant writer of travel-related essays and fiction. This aptly titled posthumous volume brings together nearly all that remains of his uncollected writings. Even the book reviews fit Chatwin's passion for renunciation of anything tying one to a fixed abode. The collection scrapes the bottom of the barrel, for included is a long letter to his London publisher projecting a book on the nomadic life he would never complete. However, two essays intended for it follow, and they make the reader regret the decision to abandon the book. Two autobiographical pieces set his life in context, describing his beginnings as a writer and the background of his rejection of "things." Of the four short pieces characterized as fiction, at least two are also closely autobiographical. Chatwin quotes Robert Burton (The Anatomy of Melancholy) as claiming that everything we experience in nature teaches us "that we should ever be in motion." Whatever hampers mobility, Chatwin contends “and urban civilization is the chief obstacle diminishes independence” by attaching us to emotional and economic "anchors." These disparate pieces hang together thematically but will be attractive largely to Chatwin's legion of loyalists who want to learn more about him.

Chatwin, Bruce. In Patagonia. (1988)
Fascinated by Patagonia since an early childhood lust for Grandma's scrap of hairy Giant Sloth skin, Chatwin's also intrigued by odd miners and the log cabin built by Butch Cassidy in Cholila. In 1977 the London Observer called it "a brilliant travel book," and while Chatwin's no longer alive (he died in 1989), his book still glows. From Rio Negro to the southernmost town of Ushuaia, Chatwin depicts all in writing as spare as the Patagonian desert itself, and as vibrant as the purple clouds off Last Hope Sound.

Chatwin, Bruce. The Songlines. (1988)
The late Bruce Chatwin carved out a literary career as unique as any writer's in this century: his books included In Patagonia, a fabulist travel narrative, The Viceroy of Ouidah,a mock-historical tale of a Brazilian slave-trader in 19th century Africa, and The Songlines, his beautiful, elegiac, comic account of following the invisible pathways traced by the Australian aborigines. Chatwin was nothing if not erudite, and the vast, eclectic body of literature that underlies this tale of trekking across the outback gives it a resonance found in few other recent travel books. A poignancy, as well, since Chatwin's untimely death made The Songlines one of his last books.

Chatwin, Bruce. Utz, a Novel. (1988)
The narrator goes to Prague to meet with Utz, a collector of Meissen porcelain. This collection, which Utz has protected and enlarged through both World War I and Czechoslovakia’s years of Stalinism, numbers for than 1,000 pieces, all crammed into his two room Prague flat.

Cherry-Garrard, Apsley. The Worst Journey in the World (Reprint, 2006)
This book is the author's account of his own journey to find the Emperor penguins nesting grounds in the Antarctic winter, set into the context of Scott's final journey to the South Pole.

Chynoweth, Kate (Editor). The Risks of Sunbathing Topless: and Other Funny Stories from the Road. (2005)
From Mount Kilimanjaro to Maui, from Seoul to Saint Petersburg, these wry, amusing, and insightful tales capture the comedic essence of bad travel, and the uniquely female experience on the road.

Clark, Eleanor. The Oysters of Lacmariaquer. (1964)
What an elegant book this is, starting with that most elegant of creatures, the Belon oyster....[Clark's] fantastic blending of science and art, history and journalism, brings the appetite back for life and literature both.

Coelho, Paulo. The Alchemist (1993).
This novel is about following one’s dreams and deepest desires (literally in the story as the main character travels from Spain to Egypt) against the current of a society motivated by money and status.

Coelho, Paulo. The Zahir: A Novel of Obsession (2005).
This book, whose title means "the present" or "unable to go unnoticed" in Arabic, centers on the narrator's search for his missing wife, Esther, a journalist who fled Iraq in the runup to the present war, only to disappear from Paris. Through the narrator's journey from Paris to Kazakhstan, Coelho explores various meanings of love and life.
"Everything that’s written in my books is part of my soul, part of the lessons I’ve learned throughout my life, and which I try to apply to myself. I am a reader of my own books." (Zahir)
“The Zahir invites the reader on a man's quest to find his missing wife. This quest is a mysterious journey of self exploration and meaning in life. Enter the world of the Zahir and allow yourself to experience the adventure and wisdom that lies in these pages. It’s brilliant, creative, thought provoking and a must-read for the seeker of Truth.” (a review on Amazon)

Conlon, Fair. Ingrid Emerick, and Christina Henry de Tessan (Editors). A Woman Alone: Travel Tales from Around the Globe. (2001)
This collection, true adventure stories of women traveling in every corner of the globe, tackles the myriad obstacles and successes of solo travel with honesty, warmth, and humor. Whether racing camels in the Sahara or dining solo in China, exploring a remote Turkish village or forging an unlikely friendship on the streets of Huehuetenango, the women in these stories emerge from their adventures with not only a greater sense of the world, but a more profound understanding of themselves.

Cousineau, Phil. The Art of Pilgrimage: The Seeker’s Guide to Making Travel Sacred. (1998)
Cosineau triggers the imagination and memory of all inner and outer journeys one has or has not taken. he explores many diverse ways of soulful travel, and reminds us that the task of the pilgrim is to deepen the mystery for oneself through the oldest form of self-remembering and rediscovery called pilgrimage.

Day, Cathy. The Circus in Winter (2005).
Day's debut collection spins graceful, elegant circles around the acrobats, clowns and circus folk of the Great Porter Circus who spent their winters in Lima Indiana from 1884 to 1939. Thanks to finely observed details and lovely prose, each of these stories is a convincing world in miniature, filled with longing and fueled by doubt. Day, who grew up in a town like Lima and descends from circus folk herself, uses family stories, historical research and archival photographs to weave these enchantments. In "Circus People," Ollie's granddaughter reflects on her fellow itinerant academics, "my latest circus family," and muses about people all over America who leave the place they grew up: "when the weather and the frequency are just right, we can all hear our hometowns talking softly to us in the back of our dreams."

De Botton, Alain. The Art of Travel. (2002)
An experienced traveler and the author of five books, including How Proust Can Change Your Life, De Botton here offers nine essays concerning the art of travel. Divided into five sections "Departure," "Motives," "Landscape," "Art," and "Return" the essays start with one of the author's travel experiences, meander through artists or writers related to it, and then intertwine the two. De Botton's style is very thoughtful and dense; he considers events of the moment and relates them to his internal dialog, showing how experiences from the past affect the present. In "On Curiosity," for example, which describes a weekend in Madrid, De Botton compares his reliance on a very detailed guidebook to the numerous systematic measurements Alexander von Humboldt made during his 1799 travels in South America. De Botton compares Humboldt's insatiable desire for detail with his own ennui and wish that he were home. There are also details about a fight over dessert, the van Gogh trail in Provence, and Wordsworth's vision of nature.

De Lisle, Guy. Shenzhen: A Travelogue from China. (2004). A graphic novel travelogue about China. Awesome.De Lisle, Guy. Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea. (2006). A graphic novel travelogue about North Korea. Awesome.

Didion, Joan. Salvador. (1993)
Joan Didion went to El Salvador for a couple of weeks in 1982 and wrote this great short book about her experience. Her tale is not about the details of the civil war or the politics involved, but just the mood of the country during that slice of time. Senseless and violent murder pervaded, and she captured it vividly and brilliantly.

Duras, Marguerite. The Lover, a Novel. (1984)
Set in the pre-war Indochina of Duras’ childhood, The Lover is a fascinating story of a 15 ½-year-old girl and her wealthy Chinese lover. Written in a style described as both “spare” and “emotionally charged” it succeeds beautifully in evoking life at the end of the colonial period and in describing the incandescent relationship between two outcasts.

Durrell, Lawrence. Bitter Lemons of Cyprus. (Reprint 2001)
An evocative memoir of the author's stay [1953-6] in what's now Northern Cyprus. Much of the landscape was still as he described it when we visited Belle Pais, Famagusta, Kyrenia, and Nicosia, the Tree of Idleness and other sites on our hiking trip to Cyprus in 2001. His adventures in buying and maintaining a house rival those of Peter Mayle's "A Year in Provence"written many years later. The peaceful interludes in the hills are marred by foreshadowing of the political turmoil and tragedies that would engulf Cyprus in the following decades, leading to the departure of Durrell and other foreign nationals. Some of those towns and even cities remain ghost towns to this day. Once hard to find, this book has now been deservedly reissued.

Durrell Lawrence. Prospero’s Cell: A Guide to the Landscape and Manners of the Island of Corcyra (1978)
This is a memoir about Durrell's stay of several years on the Island of Corfu and about the delightfully intelligent and profoundly cultured bevy of lunatics who make up his circle of friends. There is an Armenian jounalist, a studious doctor, a member of the nobility of dubious origins. There are marvelous land- and seascapes, peasants, servants, drivers and fishermen. While the author maintains the kind of distance from his material needed for writing, he also shows the love he feels for all these people and for this island. He makes us curse our fate for not being present at the conversations he has with his friends, which are full of historical and literary references and novel interpretations of texts and events, not in the form of rarefied abstractions but all connected quite concretely to the island and its fascinating people. There is also light banter and refined teasing. The doctor comes into possession of a brain from a cadaver that he intends to use for scientific purposes but by accident it gets served to his guests for lunch. The Armenian discovers a Greek wine he finds exquisite (he has heretofore hated Greek wines) and buys 85 bottles of it, only to find that 84 are actually quite inferior, more like high class vinegar. Durrell describes many of the customs and attitudes of the local people and makes them seem a lot more honest and human than one would suppose. He treats us to a performance of the well-known Karaghiosis puppet theatre and describes the (mostly crude) reactions of some of the town luminaries. The show is ostensibly for children but the adults enjoy it as well, perhaps even more since they can appreciate all the thinly veiled political and religious references. There is a detailed description of the grape harvest with a subtly drawn Christ-figure clad only in a white shirt who treads the grapes with his arms outstretched as the red liquid oozes out from the bottom of the vat. This probably symbolizes the bloody crucifixion Greece would undergo in a not so remote future. Durrell describes a paradise but war is coming and soon all these friends will be evacuated to Alexandria, where the book's final words are written. It was very beautiful while it lasted and reading about it still gives pleasure.

Eco, Umberto. How To Travel With A Salmon (1995).Written mostly between 1975 and 1991, these how-to mini-essays are generally shorter, like monologues, by a somewhat amusing and not too garrulous conversationalist. The persona presumes to be self-deprecating but is actually fatuous, pleased to be recognized on the street by television viewers and happily aware that readers will not have had all his opportunities for travel,fame, and affluence. In these “impishly witty and ingeniously irreverent” essays, “the Andy Rooney of academia” takes on computer jargon, librarians,bureaucrats, meals on airplanes, bad coffee, taxi drivers, 33-function watches, soccer fans, and more.

Eiseley, Loren. The Immense Journey: An Imaginative Naturalist Explores the Mysteries of Man and Nature. (1946)
This is a very unusual book. It is ostensibly about the "Immense Journey" of man along his long evolutionary trail. But, in the same way that "The Odyssey" is not just an historical travel tale, Eiseley's book is much more. This is a work about the wonders of life, the joys of curiosity, the rewards from solitary time spent in the natural world and the transitory nature of all existence.

Feinberg, Ellen O. Following the Milky Way: A Pilgrimage Across Spain. (1989)
An account of the 500-mile long journey on foot on the Camino de Santiago, the thousand-year-old pilgrimage road that stretches from the French Pyrenees across northern Spain to Santiago de Compostela—a vivid personal memoir of a life-changing adventure, of chance encounters, unforeseen dangers, and unexpected pleasures.

Fermor, Patrick Leigh. A Time of Gifts. (1977)
In 1933, Patrick Leigh Fermor was eighteen. Expelled from school for a flirtation with a local girl, he headed to London to set up as a writer, only to find that dream harder to realize than expected. Then he had the idea of leaving his troubles behind. He abandoned London and set out across Europe like a tramp, traveling on foot, sleeping in hayricks, sheltering in barns. He shouldered his rucksack and set forth on this extraordinary trek that was to take him up the Rhine, down the Danube, and on to Constantinople.

Fermor, Patrick Leigh. Between the Wood and the Water. (1986)
This volume begins where A Time of Gifts left off, with Fermor, now nineteen years old in 1934, standing on the bridge crossing the Danube between Hungary and Slovakia. A trip downriver to Budapest follows, along with passage on horseback across the Great Hungarian Plain, and a crossing of the Romanian border into Transylvania. Remote castels, villages, monasteries, and mountains that are the haunt of bears, wolves, eagles, gypsies, and sundry religious sects are all savored in the approach to the Iron Gates, on the border of Yugoslavia and Romania. This ruggedly beautiful and historic stretch of the Danube has since been lost beneath the waters of an immense hydroelectric power plant—as indeed so much of the old Europe that Leigh Fermor’s pages so vividly evoke were soon destroyed by World War II.

Fermor, Patrick Leigh. Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese. (1958)
Patrick Leigh Fermor has been described as a “cross between Indiana Jones, James Bond, and Graham Greene.” In this book he bridges the genres of adventure story, travel writing, and memoir to reveal and ancient world (the Mani, at the tip of Greece’s southernmost promontory) living alongside the twentieth century.

Fermor, Patrick Leigh. Roumeli: Travels in Northern Greece. (1966).
Roumeli is not to be found on present-day maps. It is the name once giving to northern Greece—stretching from the Bosporus to the Adriatic and from Macedonia to the Gulf of Corinth. Fermor takes us among Sarakatsan shepherds, to the monasteries of Meteora and the villages of Krakora, and on a mission to track down a pair of Lord Byron’s slippers at Missolonghi. As he does, he brings to light the inherent conflicts of the Greek inheritance.

Field, Rachel. Hitty, Her First Hundred Years (1929).
The story details Hitty's adventures as she travels from owner to owner over the course of a century. She ends up living in locations as far-flung as Boston, New Orleans, India, and an island in the South Pacific. At various times, she is lost deep under sofa cushions, abandoned in a hayloft, and serves as part of a snake-charmer's act. Hitty begins her memoirs in 1829 Maine as an old peddler carves her out of a piece of mountain ash from Kilkenny, Ireland. Mountain-ash wood, Hitty confides, is said to bring luck and to have "power against mischief." It won the Newbery Medal for excellence in American children's literature in 1930.

Foer, Jonathan Safran. Everything Is Illuminated, a Novel. (2004)
The simplest thing would be to describe Everything Is Illuminated, Jonathan Safran Foer's accomplished debut, as a novel about the Holocaust. It is, but that really fails to do justice to the sheer ambition of this book. The main story is a grimly familiar one. A young Jewish American--who just happens to be called Jonathan Safran Foer--travels to the Ukraine in the hope of finding the woman who saved his grandfather from the Nazis. He is aided in his search by Alex Perchov, a naïve Ukrainian translator, Alex's grandfather (also called Alex), and a flatulent mongrel dog named Sammy Davis Jr. Jr. On their journey through Eastern Europe's obliterated landscape they unearth facts about the Nazi atrocities and the extent of Ukrainian complicity that have implications for Perchov as well as Safran Foer. This narrative is not, however, recounted from (the character) Jonathan Safran Foer's perspective. It is relayed through a series of letters that Alex sends to Foer. These are written in the kind of broken Russo-English normally reserved for Bond villains or Latka from Taxi. Interspersed between these letters are fragments of a novel by Safran Foer--a wonderfully imagined, almost magical realist, account of life in the shtetl before the Nazis destroyed it. These are in turn commented on by Alex, creating an additional metafictional angle to the tale.

Ford, Corey. Where the Sea Breaks Its Back: The Epic Story of Early Naturalist Georg

Steller and the Russian Exploration of Alaska (1966).

First Sentence:“YEARS AGO, when I was very young, I crossed the North Pacific from Vancouver to Japan; and one day, as our ship rounded the top of the great circle, I noticed a string of strange bare mountains rising out of the sea along the northern horizon.”

A review on Amazon: A true account of Vitus Bering's voyage from Russia to discover what is now Alaska. Anyone interested in the history of Alaska should start by reading this book, or someone looking for an actual true life adventure story that makes one appreciate the dangers encounter in the 1700's by these amazing explorers. This book is written from the journals of Georg Stellar, the naturalist on-board the boat that discovered Alaska. The first written account and identification of many species that Stellar discovered and writes about in his journals. One of which is extinct today and his writings are the only account of the massive Stellar Sea Cow. A fabulous account of these adventurers and their interaction with the beautiful, but deadly, Alaska coast and its native people.

Forester, E.M. Passage to India. (1965)
The plot of A Passage to India concerns the arrival in Chandrapore, India of Ms. Quested and her potential mother-in-law, Mrs. Moore. They come to visit Mrs. Moore's son, Ronny, who is engaged to Ms. Quested. Ms. Quested and Mrs. Moore are the typical new arrivals, and they desire to see more of the "real" India than they can see with their fellow Brits, who tend to gather in the state Club and socialize only with each other. They become involved with Dr. Aziz, a local Indian physician, who promises to show them the famous, nearby Marabar caves. Dr. Aziz is solicitous toward the Brits and craves their friendship, but he clearly has negative feelings toward them also. At the Marabar caves, an incident occurs (or does not occur) to Ms. Quested that alters all of the characters and their town inextricably. There is a trial and a bit of a mystery, but the focus is always on the characters and their conflicts. In particular, the tension between the English and the people of India is beautifully portrayed. The characters are multi-dimensional, as are their motives, which makes for a fascinating read. I found the book to be quite moving and sad - a true classic.

Gallant, Mavis. Varieties of Exile. (Reprint 2003
Mavis Gallant is the modern master of what Henry James called the international story, the fine-grained evocation of the quandaries of people who must make their way in the world without any place to call their own. The irreducible complexity of the very idea of home is especially at issue in the stories Gallant has written about Montreal, where she was born, although she has lived in Paris for more than half a century.

Varieties of Exile, Russell Banks's extensive new selection from Gallant's work, demonstrates anew the remarkable reach of this writer's singular art. Among its contents are three previously uncollected stories, as well as the celebrated semi-autobiographical sequence about Linnet Muir—stories that are wise, funny, and full of insight into the perils and promise of growing up and breaking loose.

Ghosh, Amitav. In an Antique Land: History in the Guise of a Traveler’s Tale. (1994)
In a leisurely blend of travelogue, history and cross-cultural analysis, Indian writer Ghosh reconstructs a 12th-century master-slave relationship that confounds modern concepts of slavery. Abraham Ben Yiju, a prosperous Tunisian Jewish merchant based in medieval Cairo, resettled in Aden, then spent two decades on India's Malabar Coast, where he hired a slave or servant, probably of Indian origin, named Bomma. Bomma acted as Ben Yiju's business agent and made overseas trips for him. In medieval India and the Middle East, Ghosh points out, servitude was often a career opportunity, the principal means of recruitment into privileged strata of the army and bureaucracy. Researching in letters and documents in Egypt, where he lived for several years, Ghosh ( The Shadow Lines ) evokes a world of mud-walled houses and class warfare between Egyptian laborers and landowners. He also writes vividly of southern India, a tapestry of castes, cults and worship of spirit-deities.

Gilbert, Elizabeth. Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy,

India, and Indonesia. (2007)

Gilbert (The Last American Man) grafts the structure of romantic fiction upon the inquiries of reporting in this sprawling yet methodical travelogue of soul-searching and self-discovery. Plagued with despair after a nasty divorce, the author, in her early 30s, divides a year equally among three dissimilar countries, exploring her competing urges for earthly delights and divine transcendence. First, pleasure: savoring Italy's buffet of delights,”the world's best pizza, free-flowing wine and dashing conversation partners. Gilbert consumes la dolce vita as spiritual succor. "I came to Italy pinched and thin," she writes, but soon fills out in waist and soul. Then, prayer and ascetic rigor: seeking communion with the divine at a sacred ashram in India, Gilbert emulates the ways of yogis in grueling hours of meditation, struggling to still her churning mind. Finally, a balancing act in Bali, where Gilbert tries for equipoise "betwixt and between" realms, studies with a merry medicine man and plunges into a charged love affair. Sustaining a chatty, conspiratorial tone, Gilbert fully engages readers in the year's cultural and emotional tapestry,”conveying rapture with infectious brio, recalling anguish with touching candor,”as she details her exotic tableau with history, anecdote and impression.

Gopnik, Adam. Paris to the Moon. (2000)
In 1995, Adam Gopnik, his wife, and their infant son left the familiar comforts and hassles of New York City for the urbane glamour of Paris. In the grand tradition of Stein, Hemingway, Baldwin and Liebling, Gopnik set out to enjoy the storied existence of an American in Paris.

Greene, Graham. Journey Without Maps. (1936)
His mind crowded with vivid images of Africa, Graham Greene set off in 1935 to discover Liberia, a remote and unfamiliar republic founded for released slaves. Now with a new introduction by Paul Theroux, Journey Without Maps is the spellbinding record of Greene’s journey. Crossing the red-clay terrain from Sierra Leone to the coast of Grand Bassa with a chain of porters, he came to know one of the few areas of Africa untouched by colonization. Western civilization had not yet impinged on either the human psyche or the social structure, and neither poverty, disease, nor hunger seemed able to quell the native spirit.

Greene, Graham. Travels with My Aunt, a Novel. (1970)
An enchanting tale of an unconventional lady who brings style, class and grace to smuggling, hustling and swindling. At her sister's funeral, Aunt Augusta-a spirited woman of indeterminate years-befriends her bereft nephew, Henry--a stodgy middle-aged banker who's only passion is caring for his prize dahlias. But before poor Henry can say "green thumb" twice, Aunt Augusta whisks him into a series of bizarre misadventures, which transport them throughout Europe and transform Henry into a virile and vibrant man about town.

Griffiths, Jay. Wild: An Elemental Journey. (2007)
In her second book (after A Sideways Look at Time) Griffiths narrates her seven-year exploration of the wildest places left on the globe—the Amazon rain forest, the Arctic and New Guinea, among others. The book is divided into five sections representing the "elements": earth, ice, water, fire and air. Her search for what remains wild is as much a linguistic and spiritual journey as it is a physical one, although she does take real risks, like drinking psychedelic ayahuasca infusions with shamans deep in the jungle. Griffiths's central thesis—that by developing and destroying our last wildernesses we are impoverishing our lives—is not an original one, but she brings fierce conviction and impressive scholarship to her work. Although Griffiths has great erudition and a real sensitivity to language, her ultraromantic perspective, in which civilization is always bad and nature always idyllic, lacks nuance. For someone so inspired by nature, Griffiths doesn't allow her observations to speak for themselves; instead, every event becomes another opportunity to condemn modern man. The lack of a narrative arc makes the book a collection of variations on a theme, and although Griffiths is a gifted writer, after 60 such essays, the mind starts to wander.

Gunnars, Kristjana. Night Train to Nykobing. A Novel. (1998)
A woman hopelessly in love boards the night train to Nykobing, Denmark, not knowing if the lover she leaves on the station platform will every be with her again. “Inside every greetings there is also a farewell,” the narrator tells us, and then, through attempts to write her distant lover a letter she knows she will never send, she recounts a long vigil inspired by love, and her conspiracy with a waiting heart.

Harris, Eddy L. Native Stranger (1992).Prominent black American journalist goes to Africa in search of an ancestral connection. He takes two years and begins in Morrocco and ends in Apartheid South Africa.

Holland, Patrick and Graham Huggan. Tourists with Typewriters: Critical Reflections on Contemporary Travel Writing. (2000)
Travel writing has become a commercial success, and the popularity of the genre has increased with the global spread of tourism. Holland (English, Univ. of Guelph, Ontario) and Huggan (English, Univ. of Munich) bring a literary background to their study, which covers a selection of travel narratives written after World War II with a focus on writers they consider to be "specialists" in the genre (Bruce Chatwin, Paul Theroux, V.S. Naipaul, and others). They maintain that travel writing is a form of elitism written predominantly by white, middle-class, European American males. The chapters of the book are divided in a useful and consistent format by discipline, including history, geography, culture, gender issues, and future itineraries. The authors conclude their study with a review of the likely role of travel writing in the future.

Horwitz, Tony. Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before. (2002)
Captain James Cook's three epic 18th-century explorations of the Pacific Ocean were the last of their kind, literally completing the map of the world. Yet despite his monumental discoveries, principally in the South Pacific, Cook the man has remained an enigma. In retracing key legs of the circumnavigator's journey, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Tony Horwitz chronicles the cultural and environmental havoc wrought by the captain's opening of the unspoiled Pacific to the West, as well as the alternately indifferent and passionate reactions Cook's name evokes during the writer's journeys through Polynesia, Australia, the Aleutians, and the explorer's native England.

Iyer, Pico. Video Night in Kathmandu: And Other Reports from the Not-So-Far East. (Reprint 1989)
Only in India would the American film Rambo be remade with the title role played by a woman--in a sari, no less! Only in Hong Kong would a man at a cocktail party pick up a woman with the line "What do you think of the dollar?" And only in Video Night in Kathmandu will you find detailed, unsettling portraits of a Far East in flux as experienced by Pico Iyer, a travel writer beyond compare. Tibet, China, India, and Thailand--these are among the objects of Iyer's wanderlust, the subjects of 11 essays chronicling his travels. In India, he explores the lucrative Bombay film business: "The process of turning an American movie into an Indian one was not very difficult ... but it did require a few changes.... the Indian hero had to be domesticated, supplied with a father, a mother, and a clutch of family complications." As one film director told him, " ... for example, Rambo must be given a sister who was raped." In Bangkok he finds the sex trade is well nigh impossible to avoid: " ... by the time a third official government tout approached me with the novel invitation: 'My friend. You no like birdwatching?' I was inclined to suspect that ornithology was not among his interests."Pico Iyer is more than just a travel writer. For four years, he wrote about world affairs for Time, and he brings to these brilliant, comical, and poignant essays his extensive knowledge of politics and culture as well as a journalist's eye for the telling details. Video Night in Kathmandu provides both a stark, unsettling view of modern Asia and an exploration of the ambivalent attitudes Asians hold toward the West.

Jamie, Kathleen. Among Muslims: Meetings at the Frontiers of Pakistan. (2002)
As a woman traveling alone in the early 1990s, Kathleen Jamie had exceptional access to the people inhabiting the remote Northern Areas of Pakistan: She befriended not only the men, but the purdah-observing Shia Muslim women who rarely appear in public. In the isolated mountain villages, she met locals balancing their traditions with the inevitable encroachment of tourism. When Jamie returned to the area after September 11, 2001, she was the only foreigner in the area. Among Muslims is a bold, sympathetic and superbly written account by one of the UK’s foremost poets.

Kapuscinski, Ryszard. The Shadow of the Sun (2001).A collection of essays from Polish journalist based in Africa parlayed into a book. Spans 1950s to contemporary. Mostly Western and Eastern Africa.

Kerper, Diane. Paris: The Collected Traveler: An Inspired Anthology. (2000)
This book marries a collection of previously published essays with detailed practical information, creating a colorful and deeply absorbing pastiche of opinions and advice. This book features: Distinguished writers, such as Mavis Gallant, Barbara Grizzuti Harrison, Herbert Gold, Olivier Bernier, Richard Reeves, Patricia Wells, Catharine Reynolds, and Gerald Asher, who share seductive pieces about Parisian neighborhoods, personalities, the Luxembourg Gardens, Père-Lachaise and other monuments, restaurants and wine bars, le Plan de Paris, and le Beaujolais Nouveau. Annotated bibliographies for each section with recommendations for related readings.
An A-Z "renseignements pratiques" (practical information) section covering everything from accommodations, marches aux puces (flea markets), and money to telephones, tipping, and the VAT.

Kincaid, Jamaica. A Small Place. (2000)
Kincaid here examines the geography and history of Antigua, where she was raised. We first see the island through the eyes of the typical North American tourist, who aims to exchange his or her own "everydayness" for that of someone without the same privilege. But rather than interpret Antiguan experience for outsiders, Kincaid lays bare the limits of her own understanding. She asks us to grasp the crime of empire in a new way, stressing that it can be understood only from a post-colonial point of view: surveying 20 years of a corrupt "free" government, she finds the inheritance of colonialism to be a commercial and governmental enterprise that serves individual interests. Antiguans, she effectively demonstrates, are ordinary people saddled with an unthinkable but unbreachable past.

Least Heat-Moon, William. River-Horse: Across America by Boat. (2001)
Since hitting the American roads in Blue Highways nearly 20 years ago, William Least Heat-Moon has been following another calling--to traverse America by its rivers. "I wanted to see those secret parts hidden from road travelers," he writes. And from the waterways of his 5,000-mile voyage, Least Heat-Moon shares a sharp and stirring vision of America. Filling a small bottle with brine from the Atlantic Ocean, Least Heat-Moon and his wise companion, whom he calls "Pilotis," start up the Hudson River in a 22-foot C-Dory that Least Heat-Moon has named Nikawa--from the Osage words ni for river and kawa for horse. The voyage--from New York harbor to the Pacific Ocean--packs surprises, wisdom, regrets, mishaps, candor, and conversations that readers who savored Blue Highways and PrairyErth will delight in. The impetus for River Horse is one of intrigue--less urgent than the departure in Blue Highways--and the narrative possesses a captivating pull as it courses westward through the strongest currents and pauses in the back eddies of contemporary American life. Least Heat-Moon is in his element. Written in short thematic chapters, River Horse plies canals, greets the Missouri's many moods, and challenges chaotic waves. Indeed, the turbulent and placid waters of America flow throughout this well-told story. When Nikawa finally reaches the Pacific Ocean, Least Heat-Moon has discovered a new America in the country he knows so well. He ponders the command that rivers hold on him and celebrates the national treasures that they are. Exceeding 500 pages, River Horse may be a long journey, but when traveling by rivers, America is a larger country. A triumphant book all the way to the salty Pacific.

Lessing, Doris. African Laughter: Four Visits to Zimbabwe (1992). From notable British author who was born in Zimbabwe (nee Rhodesia); Lessing returns in 1982, 1988, 1989, and 1992.

LeSueur, Meridel. The Dread Road. (1991).
On a bus trip from El Paso to Denver, a young woman bears a precious cargo. to the narrator, sick with guilt and the victim of a historical tragedy, she brings first nightmare, then the possibility of redemption. Produced in a collective vision, the book features a unique structure—told in three consecutively running columns of text, each of which tells a different angle of the story.

Levi-Strauss, Claude. Tristes Tropiques. (1955)
"I hate travelling and explorers," famously declared Claude Lévi-Strauss, but how fortunate for readers that he should overcome his loathing to write about his experiences among the indigenous peoples of the Brazilian interior, including the Caduveo, Bororo, and Nambikwara tribes. Those who know Lévi-Strauss and Tristes Tropiques by reputation only will be pleasantly surprised by the intimate tone that colors even its most precise anthropological sections, as well as the autobiographical passages at the beginning, in which the author recounts how he fell into his career and how, shortly after the Nazis occupied Paris, he was forced to flee to America in a grueling sea voyage. Twenty-five black-and-white photographs of tribespeople, as well as numerous line drawings, accompany the text.

Lopez, Barry. Arctic Dreams. (1986)
Based on 15 extended trips to the Canadian far north over a five-year period, Arctic Dreams celebrates the mysteries of what documentarians fondly call "last frontiers." Such places are everywhere in danger of destruction in the interest of ever-elusive economic progress, but Lopez writes no jeremiads. Instead, he aims to foster a kind of learned understanding of wild places, in this case the vast, scarcely knowable northern landscape. Writing of the natural history of the Arctic and its inhabitants--narwhals, polar bears, beluga whales, musk oxen, and caribou among them--Lopez draws powerful lessons from the land and imparts them assuredly and gracefully. Arctic Dreams deservedly won a National Book Award in 1986 when it was first published.

Macauley, Rose. The Towers of Trebizond. (Reprint 2003).
"'Take my camel, dear,' said my aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass." So begins The Towers of Trebizond, the greatest novel by Rose Macaulay, one of the eccentric geniuses of English literature. In this fine and funny adventure set in the backlands of modern Turkey, a group of highly unusual travel companions makes its way from Istanbul to legendary Trebizond, encountering potion-dealing sorcerers, recalcitrant policemen, and Billy Graham on tour with a busload of Southern evangelists. But though the dominant note of the novel is humorous, its pages are shadowed by heartbreak—as the narrator confronts the specters of ancient empires, religious turmoil, and painful memories of lost love.

Mahoney, Rosemary. Whoredom in Kimmage. (1993)
Mahoney (The Early Arrival of Dreams) looks at Irish women and their efforts to bring Ireland--in terms of personal choice and freedom--into the late 20th century. The author, who is an American of Irish descent, dissects the Irish--men and women alike--through their words and actions. Unremarkably, most of the book's focus is spent in pubs in Dublin and Corofin, County Clare. We listen to Francis, the wise publican at Dillon's pub: " . . . if the Dutch were in Ireland, they'd own half of Europe, and if the Irish were in Holland, they'd drown," and we encounter the extraordinary women of J. J. Smythe's lesbian bar in Dublin on their Saturday night adventures. The author portrays the sexual tension (much of it fueled by alcohol) that permeates the society. We also see the fruits of that sexual tension--a notably high illegitimacy rate and its social and political fallout. Mahoney, who has a wonderful ear for the expletive-filled Irish use of English, has the ability to chill the bones and make one feel loneliness as a theme of Irish life.

Martone, Michael. The Blue Guide to Indiana. (2001)
The master of the nearly true is back with The Blue Guide to Indiana, an ersatz travel book for the Hoosier State. Michael Martone, whose trademark is the blurring of the lines between fact and fiction, has created an Indiana that almost is. Let Martone guide you through every inch of the amazing state this is home to the Hoosier Infidelity Resort Area, the site of Wendell Willkie’s Ascension Into Heaven, and the Annual Eyeless Fish Fry.

Maso, Carole. The American Woman in a Chinese Hat. (1994)
Catherine, 33, beautiful and vibrant, bisexual (though preferring women) and passionately driven as a writer, drifts through the bars and bedrooms of Vence on the French Riviera seeking sexual partners. Maso's enchanting fourth novel unfolds in a fragmented, poetic prose that is exciting, delicious and lucid. Jilted by Lola, her American lover, Catherine tries to quell her emotional turmoil with a chain of lovers, finally connecting with Lucien, a sweet longhaired youth she picks up at the village fountain. Under the glaring Cote d'Azur sun, Catherine feels herself ignited by a manic misery she compulsively funnels into her writing. Language is the shape of her pain and her desire: she continually inscribes her life as she experiences it, reinventing herself in the pages of her notebook. Maso remains in control of her preoccupation with the writerly act, e.g., splitting Catherine's identity into third- and first-person narratives, maintaining one voice that is mischievously aloof. Paradoxically, the author presents the novel as a finished artifact, yet creates an illusion of improvisation as Catherine suffers and scribbles. The fountain forms a recurrent motif, along with images of birds and radiant light, until the novel's striking finale.

Matthiessen, Peter. The Birds of Heaven: Travels with Cranes. (2001)
Acclaimed writer Peter Matthiessen, a self-professed "craniac," has been observing and studying all kinds of birds most of his life, but his pursuit of cranes is closer to a spiritual quest than a naturalist's exercise. These majestic, mythic, and notoriously shy birds, capable of soaring at heights of 20,000 feet, are often fond of remote and rugged places, so just locating the birds can be difficult enough, determining an accurate number often impossible. Some locales, such as the breeding grounds on the Platte River in Nebraska, boast flocks half a million strong--"by far the greatest crane assemblies on earth"; other areas support only a precious few. Matthiessen's search for 15 different species of cranes has taken him to hidden corners of Siberia, China, Mongolia, Tibet, Sudan, and Australia (where Atherton cranes were not even discovered until 1961). Despite his many years of adventure and wide travels, each crane sighting is still a thrill for him, and his curiosity and contagious enthusiasm bring the book alive. But The Birds of Heaven also serves as an ecological warning: "Perhaps more than any other living creatures, they evoke the retreating wilderness, the vanishing horizons of clean water, earth, and air upon which their species--and ours, too, though we learn it very late--must ultimately depend for survival."

Matthiessen, Peter. The Snow Leopard. (1978)
In the autumn of 1973, the writer Peter Matthiessen set out in the company of zoologist George Schaller on a hike that would take them 250 miles into the heart of the Himalayan region of Dolpo, "the last enclave of pure Tibetan culture on earth." Their voyage was in quest of one of the world's most elusive big cats, the snow leopard of high Asia, a creature so rarely spotted as to be nearly mythical; Schaller was one of only two Westerners known to have seen a snow leopard in the wild since 1950.Published in 1978, The Snow Leopard is rightly regarded as a classic of modern nature writing. Guiding his readers through steep-walled canyons and over tall mountains, Matthiessen offers a narrative that is shot through with metaphor and mysticism, and his arduous search for the snow leopard becomes a vehicle for reflections on all manner of matters of life and death. In the process, The Snow Leopard evolves from an already exquisite book of natural history and travel into a grand, Buddhist-tinged parable of our search for meaning. By the end of their expedition, having seen wolves, foxes, rare mountain sheep, and other denizens of the Himalayas, and having seen many signs of the snow leopard but not the cat itself, Schaller muses, "We've seen so much, maybe it's better if there are some things that we don't see." That sentiment, as well as the sense of wonder at the world's beauty that pervades Matthiessen's book, ought to inform any journey into the wild.

Mayle, Peter. A Year in Provence. (1989)
Who hasn't dreamed, on a mundane Monday or frowzy Friday, of chucking it all in and packing off to the south of France? Provençal cookbooks and guidebooks entice with provocatively fresh salads and azure skies, but is it really all Côtes-du-Rhône and fleur-de-lis? Author Peter Mayle answers that question with wit, warmth, and wicked candor in A Year in Provence, the chronicle of his own foray into Provençal domesticity.Beginning, appropriately enough, on New Year's Day with a divine luncheon in a quaint restaurant, Mayle sets the scene and pits his British sensibilities against it. "We had talked about it during the long gray winters and the damp green summers," he writes, "looked with an addict's longing at photographs of village markets and vineyards, dreamed of being woken up by the sun slanting through the bedroom window." He describes in loving detail the charming, 200-year-old farmhouse at the base of the Lubéron Mountains, its thick stone walls and well-tended vines, its wine cave and wells, its shade trees and swimming pool--its lack of central heating. Indeed, not 10 pages into the book, reality comes crashing into conflict with the idyll when the Mistral, that frigid wind that ravages the Rhône valley in winter, cracks the pipes, rips tiles from the roof, and tears a window from its hinges. And that's just January.In prose that skips along lightly, Mayle records the highlights of each month, from the aberration of snow in February and the algae-filled swimming pool of March through the tourist invasions and unpredictable renovations of the summer months to a quiet Christmas alone. Throughout the book, he paints colorful portraits of his neighbors, the Provençaux grocers and butchers and farmers who amuse, confuse, and befuddle him at every turn. A Year in Provence is part memoir, part homeowner's manual, part travelogue, and all charming fun.

Mayes, Frances. Under the Tuscan Sun. (Reprint 1997)
In this memoir of her buying, renovating, and living in an abandoned villa in Tuscany, Frances Mayes reveals the sensual pleasure she found living in rural Italy, and the generous spirit she brought with her. She revels in the sunlight and the color, the long view of her valley, the warm homey architecture, the languor of the slow paced days, the vigor of working her garden, and the intimacy of her dealings with the locals. Cooking, gardening, tiling and painting are never chores, but skills to be learned, arts to be practiced, and above all to be enjoyed. At the same time Mayes brings a literary and intellectual mind to bear on the experience, adding depth to this account of her enticing rural idyll.

McCrorie, Edward (Translator) Homer. The Odyssey (2004)
New translation of The Odyssey captures the spare, powerful tone of Homer’s epic while engaging contemporary readers with its brisk pace, idiomatic language, and lively characterization. (“The best available verse translation for Greekless readers”—Choice Magazine.)

Middleton, Mick. Kalashnikovs and Zombie Cucumbers: Travels in Mozambique. (1994). Title explanatory. Captures the absurb quality of developing nations.

Miller, Henry. The Colossus of Marousi. (1941)
This book about Greece, by the author of Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn is incandescent with his feeling for a great people and their past. "It doesn't seem far from a miracle to me, the emergence of as friendly and joyful a book.

Miller, Henry. Tropic of Cancer. (1934)
Autobiographical novel by Henry Miller, published in France in 1934 and, because of censorship, not published in the United States until 1961. Written in the tradition of Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau, it is a monologue about Miller's picaresque life as an impoverished expatriate in France in the early 1930s. The book benefited from favorable early critical response and gained popular notoriety later as a result of obscenity trials. Containing little plot on narrative, Tropic of Cancer is made up of anecdotes, philosophizing, and rambling celebrations of life. Despite his poverty, Miller extols his manner of living, unfettered as it is by moral and social conventions. He lives largely off the resources of his friends. In exuberant and sometimes preposterous passages of unusual sexual frankness, he chronicles numerous encounters with women, including his mysterious wife Mona, as he pursues a fascination with female sexuality. Tropic of Cancer was the first of an autobiographical trilogy, followed by Black Spring (1936) and Tropic of Capricorn (1939).

Moses, Ed. Pilgrimage with Fish. (2004)
Ed Moses, in a battered canoe with his son, shares stories like any good fishing guide about water, fish and fishermen, childhood in America, fathers and sons, life and death.

Olafsson, Olaf. The Journey Home. (2002)
Holed away in lush British farm country, Disa runs a small inn with her friend Anthony. They're both past middle age, eccentrics who understand each other too well. Their life consists of early mornings, chores, twilight walks down to the reflecting pool. Guests descend on the place in spring, full of noise and expectation. Disa runs the kitchen, serving up gourmet dinners that have become famous among savvy food critics and tourists.Olaf Olafsson's The Journey Home is constructed in tight succinct fragments, like journal entries. Shuttling between past and present, it's about reckoning with grief and bad memories in the face of death. Diagnosed with a terminal illness, Disa knows she needs to make a journey back to Iceland, a place that reflects the past back to her: a mother who abandoned her, a fiancé eventually killed by the Nazis. Although not much directly happens in this novel, great tension develops between the pull of memory and the push of the moment. In Disa, Olafsson (Absolution) has created a vibrant character who wants to overcome sadness by plunging into the sensual. She's always cooking up fantastic meals, and the descriptions of food are truly mouthwatering: trout "fried with a sprinkling of ground almonds," apples "which I love to bake after they have soaked in port for a long, quiet afternoon." The powerful smells and sights of life rescue Disa from fear--if she doesn't quite believe in God, she believes in the immediacy of the world. This is the novel's subtly redemptive tendency, laid out piece by piece in Disa's soothing melancholy voice: "Sometimes you have to get a grip on yourself to keep your thoughts under control, but it's worth it. The reward is just around the next corner, whether it is a clutch of perfect eggs in a basket or the sound of birdsong on a still day. The soul can take delight in small things if one's dreams only leave it in peace long enough."

Pham, Andrew X. Catfish and Mandala: a Two-Wheeled Voyage Through the Landscape and Memory of Vietnam. (1999)
In narrating his search for his roots, Vietnamese-American and first-time author Pham alternates between two story lines. The first, which begins in war-torn Vietnam, chronicles the author's hair-raising escape to the U.S. as an adolescent in 1977 and his family's subsequent and somewhat troubled life in California. The second recounts his return to Vietnam almost two decades later as an Americanized but culturally confused young man. Uncertain if his trip is a "pilgrimage or a farce," Pham pedals his bike the length of his native country, all the while confronting the guilt he feels as a successful Viet-kieu (Vietnamese expatriate) and as a survivor of his older sister Chai, whose isolation in America and eventual suicide he did little to prevent. Flipping between the two story lines, Pham elucidates his main dilemma: he's an outsider in both America and VietnamAin the former for being Vietnamese, and the latter for being Viet-kieu. Aside from a weakness for hyphenated compounds like "people-thick" and "passion-rich," Pham's prose is fluid and fast, navigating deftly through time and space. Wonderful passages describe the magical qualities of catfish stew, the gruesome preparation of "gaping fish" (a fish is seared briefly in oil with its head sticking out, but is supposedly still alive when served), the furious flow of traffic in Ho Chi Minh City and his exasperating confrontations with gangsters, drunken soldiers and corrupt bureaucrats. In writing a sensitive, revealing book about cultural identity, Pham also succeeds in creating an exciting adventure story.

Philbrick, Nathaniel. In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex(2001).
This book examines the 19th-century Pacific whaling industry through the arc of the sinking of the whaleship Essex by a boisterous sperm whale. The story that inspired Herman Melville's classic Moby-Dick has a lot going for it--derring-do, cannibalism, rescue--and Philbrick proves an amiable and well-informed narrator, providing both context and detail. We learn about the importance and mechanics of blubber production--a vital source of oil--and we get the nuts and bolts of harpooning and life aboard whalers. We are spared neither the nitty-gritty of open boats nor the sucking of human bones dry.

Pirsig, Robert. Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. (1974)
Arguably one of the most profoundly important essays ever written on the nature and significance of "quality" and definitely a necessary anodyne to the consequences of a modern world pathologically obsessed with quantity. Although set as a story of a cross-country trip on a motorcycle by a father and son, it is more nearly a journey through 2,000 years of Western philosophy. For some people, this has been a truly life-changing book.

Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Studies in Travel Writing and Transculturation. (1992)
Imperial Eyes explores European travel and exploration writing, in connection with European economic and political expansion since 1700. It is both a study in genre, and a critique of ideology. Pratt examines how travel books by Europeans create the domestic subject of European imperialism, and how they engage metropolitan reading publics with expansionist enterprises whose material benefits accrued mainly to the very few. These questions are addressed through readings of particular travel accounts connected with particularhistorical transitions, from the eighteenth century to Paul Theroux: sentimental travel writing and its links with abolitionist rhetoric, discursive reinventions of South America during the period of its independence (1800-1840), and eighteenth-century European writings on Southern Africa in the context of inland expansion.

Prose, Francine. Guided Tours of Hell: Novellas. (2002)
These two novellas about Americans abroad combine to create one wallop of a book. As they confront the legacy of history and their own shortcomings, Prose's characters are obsessively self-aware, even narcissistically petty--just like we are. In the title story, Landau, a struggling playwright, engages in a vanity-laden struggle of wills with a charismatic Holocaust-survivor in the cafeteria of a death camp-turned-tourist-attraction during a Kafka symposium. In the second novella "Three Pigs in Five Days," Nina is sent to Paris by her boss and ex-lover to write an article about a whorehouse-turned-hotel. While there, she is plagued by the demons of her erotic past as well as the romantic ghosts of the dysfunctional relationships of dead Parisian artists and their mistresses. Always harrowing, occasionally baroque, and tinged with hilarity, Guided Tours of Hell is an early candidate for the best fiction of the year.

Pyle, Robert Michael. Chasing Monarchs. (1999)
A long-standing bit of American nature folklore holds that monarch butterflies west of the Rocky Mountains migrate to wintering grounds in California, whereas those east of the Rockies migrate to wintering grounds in Mexico--and that the two classes of monarchs never meet and mix. Robert Pyle, a lepidopterist and nature writer, decided as a matter of curiosity to test the verity of this observation. His loosely conceived experiment took him over much of western North America, from a monarch breeding ground deep in the forests of British Columbia to the pine-clad mountainsides of central Mexico. His long journey forms the narrative frame for the aptly titled Chasing Monarchs, a book that mixes literate, and often funny, travelogue with the natural history of Danaus plexippus and its relatives. Pyle takes his readers along countless dirt roads, forest paths, cliffs, and milkweed-lined meadows to follow his quest, which he describes with plain elegance: "I'll find a monarch. I will watch it. If it flies, I'll follow it as far as I can. When I lose it, I'll take its vanishing bearing--the direction in which it disappears. Then I will quarter the countryside, by foot and by road, until I find the next suitable habitat along that bearing, and do it again." The landscape changes constantly in Pyle's quest, keeping things interesting, and Pyle imparts his evident, abundant affection for butterflies to his readers, a contagiously joyful interest that they come to share as his story progresses.

Said, Edward W. Out of Place, a Memoir. (1999)
Edward Said is one of the most celebrated cultural critics of the postwar world. Of his many books of literary, political, and philosophical criticism, Orientalism--a brilliant analysis of how Europe came to dominate the Orient through the creation of the myth of the exotic East--and the monumental Culture and Imperialism are the best known. His books have redefined readers' understanding of the impact of European imperialism upon the shape of modern culture. Said's career as a thinker spans literature, politics, music, philosophy, and history. As a dispossessed Palestinian growing up in the Middle East and subsequently living in the USA, he has witnessed the impact of the Second World War upon the Arab world, the dissolution of Palestine and the birth of Israel, the rise of Nasser and the PLO, the Lebanese Civil War, and the faltering peace process of the 1990s. As a result, the publication of Said's memoirs, Out of Place, is a particularly significant event. The book offers a fascinating account of the personal development of a critic and thinker who has straddled the divide between East and West, and in the process has redefined Western perceptions of the East and of the plight of Palestinian people. However, as the title suggests, Said's memoir is a far more ambivalent and at times personally painful account of his early years in Palestine, Egypt, and Lebanon, as well as the often paralyzing embrace of his loving but overbearing parents. Said's memoirs are powerfully informed by his sense of personally, geographically, and linguistically "always being out of place." Born to Christian parents and caught between expressing himself in Arabic, English, and French, he evokes a vivid, but often very unhappy, portrait of growing up in Cairo and Lebanon under the crushing weight of his emotionally intense and ambitious family. The early sections of the book paint a poignant picture of the oppressive regime established over the awkward, painfully uncertain young Edward by his loving mother and expectant, unforgiving father, both of whom cast the longest emotional shadows over the book. Those expecting an account of Said's subsequent intellectual development will be disappointed; apart from the final 50 pages, which deal with Said's education at Princeton and Harvard, Out of Place is, as Said himself says, primarily "a record of an essentially lost or forgotten world, my early life." It is this carefully disclosed record that accounts for Said's deeply ambivalent relationship with both his family and the Palestinian cause. Composed in the light of serious illness, Out of Place is an elegantly written reflection on a life that has movingly come to terms with "being not quite right and out of place."

Saramago, Jose. Journey to Portugal: In Pursuit of Portugal’s History and Culture. (1990)
In 1979, 19 years before he won the Nobel Prize for literature, Portuguese novelist Saramago (Blindness) journeyed across his homeland, hoping "to write a book on Portugal that [would be] capable of offering a fresh way of looking, a new way of feeling" about the country's history and culture. Out of that personal quest comes this monumental work, a literary hybrid that intermingles an intimate portrait of a nation with aspects of a novel, travel log and guide book. From the outset, a deep sense of Portuguese and European history pervades Saramago's descriptions, which evince a longing for the past whose fragments lie in every crevice, niche and portico. For example, upon seeing "traces of ancient anti-Spanish rancor in the form of obscene graffiti scored into good 15th-century stone" in Miranda do Douro, he recalls a 17th-century siege that took place in the small town. Later on in his trip, standing in the ruins of a church, he muses, "[T]he day before yesterday the Romans were here; yesterday it was the turn of the monks of Sao Cucufate; today it's the traveler." Saramago's absolute attachment to his homeland filters through every paragraph, impelling him to create a new vision of the country: a vision that aims to meld Portugal's past to its present and future. The reader may find the author's use of the third person when speaking of himself rather tedious, and some drawn-out sections waffle in personal, almost mystical, reflections. But it is difficult to resist being enchanted by the witty, at times sarcastic reveries of a man in search of his land, its history and himself. 6 maps, b&w photos.

Sebald, W.G. The Emigrants, a Novel. (1997)
A meditation on memory and loss. Sebald re-creates the lives of four exiles--five if you include his oblique self-portrait--through their own accounts, others' recollections, and pictures and found objects. But he brings these men before our eyes only to make them fade away, "longing for extinction." Two were eventual suicides, another died in an asylum, the fourth still lived under a "poisonous canopy" more than 40 years after his parents' death in Nazi Germany.Sebald's own longing is for communion. En route to Ithaca (the real upstate New York location but also the symbolic one), he comes to feel "like a travelling companion of my neighbor in the next lane." After the car speeds away--"the children pulling clownish faces out of the rear window--I felt deserted and desolate for a time." Sebald's narrative is purposely moth-holed (butterfly-ridden, actually--there's a recurring Nabokov-with-a-net type), an escape from the prison-house of realism. According to the author, his Uncle Ambros's increasingly improbable tales were the result of "an illness which causes lost memories to be replaced by fantastic inventions." Luckily for us, Sebald seems to have inherited the same syndrome.

Simeti, Mary Taylor. On Persephone’s Island: A Sicilian Journal. (1986)
Mary Taylor Simeti arrived in Sicily in 1962 to do volunteer work. Freshly graduated from Radcliffe College after growing up in a distinguished and privileged New York City family, the last thing she expected was to fall in love and marry a Sicilian. On Persephone's Island: A Sicilian Journal is the ambivalent love story of an intelligent, complex, and self-reflective woman. The book recounts the events of 1983, the year Simeti turned 42. Her narrative alternates between Palermo, where her children attend school and her husband Toninno is a professor of agricultural economy, and Bosco, in eastern Sicily, where she shoulders demanding responsibilities on the working farm that has belonged to her husband's family for three generations.Simeti feels the isolation of being an expatriate and outsider, although she claims to welcome this perspective when faced with frustration and disgust at the pervading political corruption and corrosive effects of the Mafia on everyday life. Despite her natural diffidence, she shares personal insights that makeOn Persephone's Island as compelling as her prose. Simeti intersperses rich helpings of Sicilian history and culture with mundane events and insight into what motivates the peasants essential to the survival of the family farm. And she makes pessimistic observations about the complexity of changing times in a society where the persistent reliance on feudal relationships and agriculture is finally crumbling. An academic manqué, Simeti researches and ruminates on the mythological underpinnings of the many holidays and festivals that punctuate the rhythm of Sicilian life. She focuses particularly on the Greek goddesses Persephone and Demeter, who held Sicily under their protection. She eventually discovers a correlation between her own situation and the story of Persephone, who alternately inhabited the worlds of light and darkness.

Solnit, Rebecca. Wanderlust: A History of Walking. (2000)
In Wanderlust, Solnit draws together many histories—of anatomical evolution and city design, of treadmills and labyrinths, of walking clubs and sexual mores—to create a portrait of the range of possibilities for this most basic act. Solnit’s book finds a profound relationship between walking and thinking, walking and culture, and argues for the necessity of preserving the time and space in which to walk in an evermore automobile-dependent and accelerated world.

Stark, Freya. The Valleys of the Assassins: and Other Persian Travels. (1934)
Hailed as a classic upon its first publication in 1934, The Valley 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 a shoestring budget.

Storace, Patricia. Dinner with Persephone: Travels in Greece. (1997)
For many, Greece is a land lost in time. It conjures up images of the looming Parthenon with its pillars of marble and the timeless whitewashed buildings of its parched islands glinting against a backdrop of the crystal blue Mediterranean. But ask about contemporary Greece and most people draw a blank. In Dinner with Persephone, poet Patricia Storace does a compelling job of filling in this empty canvas. She conjures a country where history and modernity coexist in often surprising ways, and with the past as an ineluctable backdrop, Storace paints in the everyday details that bring the country and its people vividly to life.

Theroux, Paul. Dark Star Safari (2004).Noted travelwriter Theroux returns to Africa after twenty+ years away. He travels overland from Cairo to Capetown.

Theroux, Paul. The Great Railway Bazaar. (Reprint 2006)
Now a classic of the travel genre, The Great Railway Bazaar chronicles Paul Theroux's adventures by rail from Victoria Station in London to Tokyo Central, told with his signature wry observations.

Theroux, Paul. The Pillars of Hercules (1995).
A record of one man's journey around the Mediterranean. Theroux’s only aim was to explore the Mediterranean coast without resort to airplanes. As a result, he found himself in unfamiliar villages on untraveled roads, acquired unexpected companions and slept in an assortment of inns, from fleabags to Hilton hotels, in Gibraltar Spain, the Riviera, Croatia, Sardinia, Greece, Albania, Morocco, the Levant and Israel.

Theroux, Paul. Sunrise with Seamonsters (1985).Collection of Theroux's early travel essays from Kenya, Uganda, and S. America, Asia. Thompson, Hunter S. The Rum Diary (1959).Begun in 1959 by a then-twenty-two-year-old Hunter S. Thompson, The Rum Diary is a brilliantly tangled love story of jealousy, treachery and violent alcoholic lust in the Caribbean boomtown that was San Juan, Puerto Rico, in the late 1950s. Exuberant and mad, youthful and energetic, The Rum Diary is an outrageous, drunken romp in the spirit of Thompson's bestselling Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Hell's Angels.West, Rececca. Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. (1941) A sprawling experimental travelogue in the Balkans; modernism incarnate.

Whitehead, Colson. The Colossus of New York: A City in Thirteen Parts. (2003)
Anointed with a MacArthur "genius" grant, Whitehead now presents a ravishing cycle of imaginative and evocative prose poems in tribute to his home, New York City, the quintessential metropolis of dreams. Writing in short, emphatic sentences, Whitehead riffs poignantly and playfully on myriad strategies for urban survival as he incisively distills the kaleidoscopic frenzy of the city into startlingly vital metaphors and cartoon-crisp analogies. Intensely sensory in his details, wistful and funny in his psychological disclosures, he makes everything come to mythic life, from the fury of rush hour to the strained etiquette of subway riders to Central Park, Times Square, Coney Island, and the Brooklyn Bridge. The mad choreography a rainstorm puts into motion, the rituals of downtown nightclubs, the horrors of the 9-to-5 routine, the waxing and waning of the self against the backdrop of so many other souls are all given a sharp, metaphysical twist in Whitehead's gorgeous rendering of New York as a colossal, ever-metamorphosing phantasm. (from Booklist)

Wheeler, Sara. Terra Incognita: Travels in Antarctica. (1999)
When explorers such as Ernest Shackleton, Roald Amundsen, and Robert Falcon Scott all set off to Antarctica in the early years of the 20th century, the polar regions were among the last truly unexplored areas of the world--and arguably the least hospitable. Scott lost his life, pinned down in a howling blizzard only 11 miles from his supply depot; Shackleton lost his ship, crushed in the ice. Even those who survived the icy wastes did so only with enormous effort. And yet, there is something about Antarctica that beckons people; eighty years after Shackleton's voyage, Sara Wheeler answered the call, leaving her comfortable home for "the Great White." Terra Incognita is the result of her sojourn in that legendary land.In addition to chronicling her own encounters with the people and the place, Wheeler brings the past alive as well, through vivid stories about the heroes of polar exploration: Shackleton, Scott, Amundsen, and others who practically become secondary characters in Wheeler's account. But it is her interactions with the living people who make up the community--scientists, drifters, and dreamers who have settled this forbidding landscape--that make Terra Incognita a rare and worthy book.

Notable Travel Anthology: Guest edited by a different noted traveler writer each year, Best American Travel Essays is issued each year re-printing the best short travel pieces published in magazines and journals. Houghton Mifflin publishes The Best American Series.

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