Travel Essays

Twenty-seven-year-old Nell Stevens was determined to write a novel, but life kept getting in the way. Then came a game-changing opportunity: she won a fellowship that would let her spend three months, all expenses paid, anywhere in the world to research and write a book. Would she choose a glittering metropolis, a romantic village, an exotic paradise? Not exactly. Nell chose Bleaker Island, a snowy, windswept pile of rock in the Falklands. There, in a guesthouse where she would be the only guest, she could finally rid herself of distractions and write.

Netting the Sun offers a carefully crafted diversity of natural and human stories from a landscape seemingly empty and forlorn to passing casual travelers. This surprising interpretation of south central Oregon's botany, geology, wildlife, ethnography, and history reveals what a truly special place the high desert is.

Mairead Small Staid’s debut, The Traces, is a work of memoir and criticism that explores the nature of happiness in art, literature, and philosophy, structured around a season spent in Italy and a reading of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. Poised between plummeting depressions, the author considers the intellectual merits of joy and the redeeming promise offered by the beauty, both natural and manmade, that surrounds her.

Through stories remembered and imagined, A Stranger's Pose draws the listener into a world of encounters in more than a dozen African towns. Iduma blends memoir, travelogue, and storytelling in these fragments of a traveler’s journey across several African cities.

Baumer''s life was ended by an SUV in January of 2017 while he was walking barefoot across America for the second time to draw attention to climate change. Baumer was a prolific wizard of non sequitur and displacement, and these writings show the maturation of an absurdist conscience, applying itself to inequities of access: power, security, and meaning itself, within the confines of America and within that, the contemporary professionalized writing culture.

A short sublime book on the three things dearest to Jean-Claude Izzo’s heart: his native Marseilles, the sea in all its splendor, and Mediterranean noir — the literary genre his books helped to found. This collection of writings shows Izzo, author of the acclaimed Marseilles trilogy, at his most contemplative and insightful. His native city, with its food, its flavors, its passionate inhabitants, and its long, long history of commerce and conviviality, constitute the lifeblood that runs through all of Izzo’s work.

Our National Parks by John Muir is a brilliant guide and introduction to Yosemite and several other magnificent parks by the man who helped to create them through his advocacy for the preservation of wilderness areas. The author provides detailed observations of the animals, birds, glaciers, streams, fountains, sights, scents, and sounds of Yosemite, Yellowstone, Mount Rainier, Sequoia, and other forest reservations of the West.

When I wrote my first monthly blog post in November of 2016, I didn’t really have a grip on my purpose, what my central theme or message was, or what the blog would become. I was simply and spontaneously moving pen across page. Now, looking back eight and a half years later, I realize: “Oh! I was home on the roam.” That first post doesn’t mention this, but I wrote it from Sunyani, Ghana. After a somewhat random and uncertain start, I quickly get it in gear, sitting down once a month (occasionally twice) to write about what moved me the most during the preceding weeks. Almost always ...

Journalistic stories - some with a happy ending, others ending with a crashing tragedy; simple or unbelievably complex, full of love or burning bitterness. Marcin Wójcik, a journalist from Duży Format, in his comprehensively documented and well-balanced book gives a voice to the clergymen, showing them as flesh and blood people who feel hunger, thirst, tiredness, and...have sex drive.

Pilgrims have always walked in times of upheaval, pitching themselves against weather, hunger, thirst and sometimes pain as they tread the paths their ancestors followed before them. In The Gathering Place, author, nature campaigner and veteran solo walker Mary Colwell undertakes a 500-mile pilgrimage along the Camino Francés in northern Spain at a unique moment in history – a time of pandemic, profound political change, and a climate and biodiversity emergency.

From the Paleozoic volcanoes that stained its soil, to the Saxons who occupied it, to the Tudors who traded its wool, to the Land Girls of wartime, John Lewis-Stempel charts a sweeping, lyrical history of Woodston: the quintessential English farm. With his combined skills of farmer and historian, Lewis-Stempel digs deep into written records, the memories of relatives and the landscape itself to celebrate the farmland his family have been bound to for millennia.

A couple of quiet weeks sailing the River Severn was the intention. Somehow things got out of hand—a year later, I had reached Romania and was still going. Equipped with his cheerful optimism and a pith helmet, this Australian Odysseus in a dinghy travels from the borders of North Wales to the Black Sea—4,900 kilometres over salt and fresh water, under sail, at the oars, or at the end of a tow-rope—through 12 countries, 282 locks and numerous trials and adventures, including an encounter with Balkan pirates.

Where do we want to go? That's what Nia and I asked ourselves as she worked her way through elementary school. We tacked a big laminated map of the world up in our front room, and kept dry erase markers and a footstool handy. Over the years we went through many iterations. And then we went out and did it. Of course our plans kept on changing, as did we. Join us as we set out from our home in Colorado and voyage to Forida, Puerto Rico, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Chile, Easter Island, Hawaii, Iceland, Paris, Rome, New Zealand, Indonesia, Vietnam, Cambodia, Bangkok, and Ghana. Photos included!

Thailand, the land of smiles and golden dreams, is languishing, and Pattaya, its biggest fun city, is succumbing to a thousand ills. Pattaya Pains is about living in Pattaya over the long term. Even though the collection of essays, stories, and observations herein would relish the golden dream of painting Pattaya as a romantic hotspot where Thais and foreigners bond, it can’t do so - not only because East is East and West is West, but also because Thais just don’t see foreigners in a good light.

Back-to-the-land memoir weaves essay, story, nature, magic realism, homesteading, and wilderness survival. My Country expands the containers of essay and story, adventure and lyric, and naturalism and fantasy to overlap and mingle in this collection unified in its spirit of place: the forests and mountains of interior British Columbia.

Edited by Krishna Ramanujan and Guillermo Rodríguez, Journeys offers access to Ramanujan's personal diaries and journals, providing a window into his creative process. It will include literary entries from his travels, his thoughts on writing, poetry drafts, and dreams. His diaries and journals served as fertile ground where he planted the seeds for much of his published work....

Rescue offers riveting stories about what happens when things go terribly wrong in some of the world's most perilous places: Himalayan peaks, African plains, vast oceans, remote Arctic wilderness. The result is a collection of first-rate prose read by masterful narrators that makes for compulsive listening.

Motions and Moments is the third book by Michael Pronko on the fluid feel and vibrant confusions of Tokyo life. These essays burrow into the unique intensities that suffuse the city and ponder what they mean to its millions of inhabitants.

The hotel I checked in on my trip to Kyoto gave me a discount coupon for the buffet breakfast and I had it next morning at the restaurant. The buffet had Japanese expensive dishes in addition to the familiar Western breakfast dishes, which made up the most luxurious buffet breakfast I’d ever had. As there were many foreign guests around, it produced an international atmosphere. One of the walls of the restaurant was the glass window from the ceiling to the floor. Beyond it was a small Japanese garden that had a pond with many red-and-white-colored koi fish. When I was eating delicious ...

A personal story promising laughs, surprises, tears, and joy, and guaranteed to warm your heart! When a grandmother embarked on a two-week travel adventure to Italy with her eighteen-year-old twin granddaughters, Margie Miklas’s long-awaited dream became a reality. Excited to share her beloved Italia, she hoped to create a special experience they’d treasure for the rest of their lives.