Travel : Essays & Travelogues

Daniel Kalder belongs to a unique group: the anti-tourists. Sworn to uphold the mysterious tenets of The Shymkent Declarations, the anti-tourist seeks out the dark, lost zones of our planet, eschewing comfort, embracing hunger and hallucinations, and always traveling at the wrong time of year. In Lost Cosmonaut, Kalder visits locations that most of us don't even know exist -- Tatarstan, Kalmykia, Mari El, and Udmurtia. He loves these places because no one else does, because everyone else passes them by. more...

Price: $19.95

“Let’s get lost together . . . ” Lost in My Own Backyard brings acclaimed author Tim Cahill together with one of his—and America’s—favorite destinations: Yellowstone, the world’s first national park. more...

Price: $16.95

The tale of Peter Kerr and his family as they settle into the "manana" pace of rural Mallorca, growing oranges on their little valley farm. He tells of the trials, tribulations and triumphs of the summer, including brushes with the local police and the unfortunate outcome of a drinking session. more...

Price: $9.99

This illuminating study reevaluates an often overlooked aspect of Mark Twain's writing-his travel narratives-and demonstrates their centrality to his identity and thinking. Travel books, Jeffrey Melton asserts in this study, are vital to Mark Twain's identity as a writer and to his cultural influence, and not just, as many critics have argued, preliminary sketches or failed attempts at fiction. Furthermore, the identity that Twain establishes for himself in these books as the arch "tourist" provides the most compelling perspective from which to view his entire body of work. Melton begins by outlining the conventions of travel writing in the 19th century and proceeds to document Twain's subversion of those conventions to his own ends: a reinvention of the genre. The remainder of the study examines Twain's travel narratives individually, charting a progression from the Old World in The Innocents Abroad and A Tramp Abroad, in which Twain confronts the limitations of the "tourist" experience of life and discovers the powers of imagination and self-delusion, to the New World in Roughing It and Life on the Mississippi, in which Twain seeks to reconcile his "outsider" identity with a search for home. The final section considers Twain's last travel narrative, Following the Equator, as Twain searches for a complete escape from the "tourist" perspective and its imperialistic implications. In the process, Melton shows, Twain's travelogues highlight the author's philosophical and moral evolution as a writer from the worldviews of "innocence" to "experience." Mark Twain, Travel Books, and Tourism is the first full-length work to treat Twain's travel narratives in depth and in specific context with his contemporary travel writers and with tourism. Academic libraries, students and scholars of American and southern literature, Mark Twain and travelogue enthusiasts-all will welcome this thoug more...

Price: $23.96

“Saturday was dawning warm, with only a gentle wind under a light blue sky as we got under way. . . . With the motor cut out, I could hear the whispered splash of the sea against the hull as we knifed through the Mediterranean. The calming noise, along with the gentle rocking, lulled me into a Zen calm as I went about preparing the crew’s lunch. more...

Price: $12.95