Search results

Hiking with Nietzsche: Becoming Who You Are is a tale of two philosophical journeys - one made by John Kaag as an introspective young man of nineteen, the other seventeen years later, in radically different circumstances: he is now a husband and father, and his wife and small child are in tow. Kaag sets off for the Swiss peaks above Sils Maria where Nietzsche wrote his landmark work Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Both of Kaag's journeys are made in search of the wisdom at the core of Nietzsche's philos...

Lord Byron completed his Grand Tour of the Mediterranean between 1809 and 1811, leaving England at the age of twenty-one as an undiscovered soul and returning as 'Byron', with all that implies: the brand, the baggage and the brio. With the Napoleonic Wars at their most complex, the route of this Grand Tour was to be largely seaborne. After leaving Falmouth in Cornwall with his entourage--including his best friend, pageboy, valet and eight portmanteaux for his costumes--Byron arrived in Lisbon to...

In the early 1960s, most middle-class American women in their twenties had their lives laid out for them: marriage, children, and life in the suburbs. Most, but not all. Breathless is the story of a girl who represents those who rebelled against conventional expectations. Paris was a magnet for those eager to resist domesticity, and like many young women of the decade, Nancy K. Miller was enamored of everything French,from perfume and Hermes scarves to the writing of Simone de Beauvoir and the...

In 1939 Swiss travel writer and journalist Ella K. Maillart set off on an epic journey from Geneva to Kabul with fellow writer Annemarie Schwarzenbach in a brand new Ford. As the first European women to travel alone on Afghanistan's Northern Road, Maillart and Schwarzenbach had a rare glimpse of life in Iran and Afghanistan at a time when their borders were rarely crossed by Westerners. As the two flash across Europe and the Near East in a streak of elan and daring, Maillart writes of comical mi...

Reframes Polynesia and Melanesia through analysis of nineteenth-century travel writing In Pacific Possessions: The Pursuit of Authenticity in Nineteenth-Century Oceanian Travel Accounts, Chris J. Thomas expands the literary canon on Polynesia and Melanesia beyond the giants, such as Herman Melville and Jack London, to include travel narratives by British and American visitors. These accounts were widely read and reviewed when they first appeared but have largely been ignored by scholars. For...

This volume examines the hotel experience of Anglo-American travelers in the nineteenth century from the viewpoint of literary and cultural studies as well as spatiality theory. Focusing on the social and imaginary space of the hotel in fiction, periodicals, diaries, and travel accounts, the essays shed new light on nineteenth-century notions of travel writing. Analyzing the liminal space of the hotel affords a new way of understanding the freedoms and restrictions felt by travelers from differe...

Why do bookshops matter? How do they filter our ideas and literature? In this inventive and highly entertaining extended essay, Jorge Carrion takes his reader on a journey around the world, via its bookshops. His travels take him to Shakespeare & Co in Paris, Wells in Winchester, Green Apple Books in San Francisco, Librairie des Colonnes in Tangier, the Strand Book Store in New York and provoke encounters with thinkers, poets, dreamers, revolutionaries and readers. Bookshops is the travelogue o...

Italy has long exerted a particular fascination on the Germans, and this has been reflected in German literature, most prominently in Goethe's Italienische Reise but also by numerous other writers who have returned to the topic. This book is concerned with two inextricably linked images - those of the German traveler in Italy and of Italy in German literature in the first third of the 19th century. Goethe's publication of his account nearly three decades after his actual journey was in some meas...

A must-have for every fan of literature, Booked inspires readers to follow in their favorite characters footsteps by visiting the real-life locations portrayed in beloved novels including the Monroeville, Alabama courthouse in To Kill a Mockingbird, Chatsworth House, the inspiration for Pemberley in Pride and Prejudice, and the Kyoto Bridge from Memoirs of a Geisha. The full-color photographs throughout reveal the settings readers have imagined again and again in their favorite books. Organized...

Brittany's richly layered landscape has contributed depth and character to the region's traditional oral culture, from stories of the sea and shore to tales of misty moors, sacred hill-tops and secretive forests. Evangelizing Dark Age saints from Britain laid the foundations of Breton language and society, imposing Christianity on the landscape and in the minds of the people. Their legacy rests visually in the prolific spread of chapels, churches and cathedrals, and the Celtic language still pre...

This charming and accessible guide takes as its focus the towns and villages of the Greater Tarnava Valley, home to an exceptional cultural heritage. Here Romanian, Hungarian, Saxon, Jewish and Roma elements come together in an extraordinarily rich mix, against a backdrop of some of the loveliest landscapes in Europe. Maps, plans and photographs throughout."

In a unique collaboration between Artangel and Living Architecture, a dwelling was built on top of London's Queen Elizabeth Hall. The dwelling was a boat, Roi de Belges, inspired by the Thames and by Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Writers and artists were given short residencies and wrote about the strange experience of staying in a boat overlooking the river. This book, a collection of their pieces responding to Conrad's masterpiece, is a result of that collaboration. From Juan Gabriel Vas...

Travel in the Middle Ages is filled with the stories and adventures of those who hazarded hostile landscapes, elements, and people-out of want or necessity-to get from place to place. While most journeys involved very short distances (home to market or village to village), longer trips were not uncommon in the Middle Ages. Clergy were frequently called upon to act as ambassadors, messengers, and overseers to the various monasteries and churches within their jurisdiction. Merchants, agents of the...

If you want to be able to talk about a place, the best thing to do is stay at home. Extensive travel and the experience of foreign cultures seem to be becoming an essential requirement for the modern citizen. However, actually visiting these places may not be the best way to discover them, as literature professor and psychoanalyst Pierre Bayard reveals. He champions the importance of 'armchair travel', arguing that being able to describe somewhere you have never been may even prove crucial to yo...

The acclaimed author of Expect Great Things: The Life and Search of Henry David Thoreau traverses on foot from Manhattan to Walden Pond, retracing Thoreau's steps and unlocking the practical principles of the mystic's life in the woods. When Henry David Thoreau launched his experiment in living at Walden Pond, he began by walking beyond the narrow limits of his neighbors, simply by putting himself at a mile remove from Concord's bourgeois epicenter - and a thousand-mile remove from stasis, comp...

'An exceptional first book; Harvest is a subtle, fascinating braiding of travel, cultural and natural history ... It is a pleasure and an education to journey with him in these pages' Robert MacfarlaneIn a centuries-old tradition, farmers in northwestern Iceland scour remote coastal plains for the down of nesting eider ducks.High inside a vast cave in Borneo, men perched atop rickety ladders collect swiftlets' nests, a delicacy believed to be a cure for almost anything.Eiderdown and edible birds...