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In October 1945 at the age of 19, John Freely passed the southernmost tip of Crete on his way home from the war in China, just as Odysseus did on his homeward voyage from the battle of Troy. He has been bewitched by Homer and the lands of Homer's epics ever since. As the culmination of a life spent exploring both these lands and the stories by, and connected to, Homer, Freely has created a captivating traveller's guide to Homer's lost world and to his epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey, investiga...

When the great environmental writer Edward Abbey died in 1989, four of his friends buried him secretly in a hidden desert spot that no one would ever find. The final resting place of the Thoreau of the American West remains unknown and has become part of American folklore. In this book a young writer who went looking for Abbey's grave combines an account of his quest with a creative biography of Abbey. Sean Prentiss takes readers across the country as he gathers clues from his research, travel,...

No city in the world has quite the exotic allure of Tangier. From the 17th century, it has been a city of refuge and excitements - a city where sex is cheap, drugs are plentiful, and a place where the outcasts of the world can breathe easily. The golden years of Tangier began after World War I and barely survived World War II. Among those who sought sanctuary or inspiration from the city were Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and Ronnie Kray, the unhappy Woolworth heriress Barbara Hutton, Tennessee W...

Many readers know Lawrence Durrell as the famed author of the lush and sensuous Alexandria Quartet. However, this wonderful book contains the best of Durrell's incomparable travel writing. It is collected here for the first time in a single volume and offers a chance to rediscover the author as one of the great travel writers of the twentieth century. Durrell's passionate, evocative writing about his travelsin particular the Greek islandsis a timeless exploration of how landscapes shape our expe...

Whisky, Kilts, and the Loch Ness Monster is a memoir of a twenty-first-century literary pilgrimage to retrace the famous eighteenth-century Scottish journey of James Boswell and Samuel Johnson, two of the most celebrated writers of their day. An accomplished journalist and aficionado of fine literature, William W. Starr enlivens this crisply written travelogue with a playful wit, an enthusiasm for all things Scottish, the boon and burden of American sensibility, and an ardent appreciation for Bo...

Willemsen's accounts of his visits to locations as diverse and distant from one another as a volcano on the Kamchatka Peninsula, a railway station in Burma, an icebreaker in the Arctic Ocean, and a hospital ward in Minsk, range from the mundane to the extraordinary, from the sublime to the ridiculous, and hold the reader constantly in thrall.

A Tramp Abroad, published in 1880, is Mark Twain's second travel book, a sequel to his immensely popular The Innocents Abroad. Here Twain returns to Europe in the company, as Russell Banks puts it in his introduction, of a genial "goad, guide, and all-purpose straight man" modeled on his friend and real-life traveling companion, Joe Twitchell, who "plays Butch Cassidy to Twain's Sundance, Sancho to his Quixote." The eccentric journey they take through Germany, Switzerland, Italy, and other count...

Meet Shakespeare, Heine and Hogarth south of the river, find Virginia Woolf in Bloomsbury, discover Blake and Trollope in Westminster, happen on the Carlyles in Chelsea, come across John Keats in beautiful Hampstead and search for Bacon and Hanif Kureishi in the London suburbs.

This study examines literary celebrity in Britain from 1850 to 1914. Through lively analysis of rare cultural materials, Easley demonstrates the crucial role of the celebrity author in the formation of British national identity. As Victorians toured the homes and haunts of famous writers, they developed a sense of shared national heritage. At the same time, by reading sensational accounts of writers' lives, they were able to reconsider conventional gender roles and domestic arrangements. As wome...

A NEW YORK TIMES NEW & NOTEWORTHY BOOK Good bookshops are questions without answers. They are places that provoke you intellectually, encode riddles, surprise and offer challenges ... A pleasing labyrinth where you can't get lost: that comes later, at home, when you immerse yourself in the books you have bought; lose yourself in new questions, knowing you will find answers. Picking up where the widely praised Bookshops: A Reader's History left off, Against Amazon and Other Essays explores the in...

In Cuba, Ernest Hemingway, author of The Old Man and the Sea, The Sun Also Rises, and For Whom the Bell Tolls, found a sense of serenity and enrichment he couldn't find anywhere else. Here through more than a hundred color photographs and accompanying text, is a look at the Cuba he loved. Photographer Robert Wheeler takes us through the streets and near the water's edge of Havana, and closer to the relationship Hemingway shared with the Cuban people, their landscape, their politics, and their c...

Following the Equator is an account by Mark Twain of his travels through the British Empire in 1895. He chose his route for opportunities to lecture on the English language and recoup his finances, impoverished due to a failed investment. He recounts and criticizes the racism, imperialism and missionary zeal he encountered on his travels - and all with his particular brand of wit.

In 1934, at the peak of the Great Depression, A. G. Macdonell embarked on a journey across America. This travelogue is the deliciously scathing product of that adventure: a vivid and unflinchingly honest record of life in the cities and the slums, on the roads, railways, and the vast open plains. "The hot breath of the Apocalyptic Horsemen is on my neck, and I still wake up on occasions in peaceful England, cold with terror from the dream that I am once again upon the road." By the time he depar...