Travel : Essays & Travelogues

Few foreigners have been lucky enough to set foot on Tibetan soil – Alec Le Sueur spent five extraordinary years there, working for an international hotel chain. Against the breathtaking beauty of the Himalayas he unfolds a highly amusing and politically enlightening account of his experiences. more...

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A legend, a land once seen and then lost forever, Thule was a place beyond the edge of the maps, a mystery for thousands of years. And to the Nazis, Thule was an icy Eden, birthplace of Nordic “purity.” In this exquisitely written narrative, Joanna Kavenna wanders in search of Thule, to Shetland, Iceland, Norway, Estonia, Greenland, and Svalbard, unearthing the philosophers, poets, and explorers who claimed Thule for themselves, from Richard Francis Burton to Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen. Marked by breathtaking snowscapes, haunting literature, and the cold specter of past tragedies, this is a wondrous blend of travel writing and detective work that is impossible to set down. RVIEW: Thule, real or not, is ripe and beguiling material for a literary and geographic adventurer, and Kavenna is formidable on both fronts. . . . Highly cerebral, erudite, refreshing. (The New York Times Book Review) more...

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These short travel essays from around the globe get to the heart of what the words travel and adventure really mean. In Search of Adventure explores the good, the bad, and the ugly of what traveling the world has to offer. more...

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The Innocents Abroad began as a series of travel letters written mainly for the Alta California , a San Francisco newspaper that sponsored Mark Twain’s participation in his trip to Europe and the Holy Land in 1867 aboard the steamship Quaker City. On the excursion from New York to Palestine they traveled a distance of over twenty thousand miles by sea and land through France, Spain, Italy, Morocco, Russia, Turkey and Egypt. Through his humorous writings he describes countries, nations, incidents, adventures and some of the people he encountered along the way. Elisha Bliss, published these letters as Innocents a subscription book in 1869, and then suggested to Twain that he revise the letters into this book. more...

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Isolarion takes its title from a type of fifteenth-century map that isolates an area in order to present it in detail, and that’s just what James Attlee does here for Cowley Road in Oxford. The former site of a leper hospital, a workhouse, and a medieval well said to have miraculous healing powers, Cowley Road has little to do with the dreaming spires of the tourist’s or student’s Oxford. From a sojourn in a sensory-deprivation tank to a furtive visit to an unmarked pornography emporium, the sharp-eyed Attlee investigates every aspect of the Cowley Road’s appealingly eclectic culture, where halal shops jostle with craft jewelers and nightclubs pulsate alongside quiet churchyards. Drawing inspiration from sources ranging from Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy to contemporary art, Attlee is a charming and congenial guide who revels in the extraordinary embedded in the everyday. Isolarion is at once a road movie, a quixotic stand against uniformity, and a rousing hymn in praise of the complex, invigorating nature of the twenty-first-century city. “Attlee paints an iridescent picture of a new Oxford that no guide book has yet captured.”—Richard B. Woodward, New York Times. “A gem. . . . James Attlee's scholarly, reflective and sympathetic journey up the Cowley Road . . . blends a vivid account of daily life, fluid and unsettling, in a modern British town with powerful allegorical reflections on the connections between past and present, time and space, and high culture and the hard scrabble world that sustains it.”—Economist. “The attraction, for Attlee, is that the Cowley Road ‘is both unique and nothing special’; the resulting book is unique and very special. . . . Residents of East Oxford can be proud to have this eccentric advocate and eloquent explorer in their midst.”—Geoff Dyer, Guardian. more...

Price: $15.00