In 1935 Ella Maillart contemplated one of the most arduous journeys in the world: the "impossible journey" from Peking, then a part of Japanese-occupied China, through the distant province of Sinkiang (present day Tukestan), to Kashmir. Traveling along with newswriter Peter Fleming and also her companion Annemarie Schwarzenbach, Maillart undertook a journey considered almost beyond imagination for any European and doubly so for a woman.
For more than four decades, poet Robin Magowan has journeyed in search of ecstatic spiritual experiences. Hitchhiking and walking, by bus or boat or when necessary by horse, he has explored lands as exotic as Nepal and New Guinea, as classic as Italy or France, and as forgotten as Persia and pre-Castro Cuba. All the while he has submerged himself, whether in the mysteries of Haitian voodoo or the simples pleasures of Burgundian peasant life. Known for the beauty, wit, and expressive power of his prose, Magowan's writing vibrates with the intensity of an outsider who crawls into the skin of a country--and emerges transformed.
Poet Henri Michaux boarded a ship for Ecuador in 1927 as "a man who knows neither how to travel nor how to keep a journal." The result is a work of pointed observation and sensual, even hallucinogenic, poetry and prose.
In An Italian Journey, Jean Giono describes his journey to the land of his father's people. A reluctant traveler (he rarely left Provence), Giono discovers a strange beauty not only in the palazzi and canals of Venice but also in wistful waiters, suspicious hairdressers, pugnacious men of God, recalcitrant coffeemakers, umbrellas, and field machinery. In Giono's world a stamp collectors' market can appear to verge on revolution and inept municipal musicians suddenly offer Mozartian joys.
In 1869 W. D. Howells, in reward for having written a campaign biography of Abraham Lincoln, was given the job of consul in Venice.For a young nineteenth-century American who had left...
In 1932, Peter Fleming, a literary editor, traded his pen for a pistol and took off as part of the celebrated search for missing English explorer Colonel P.H. Fawcett. With meager supplies, faulty maps, and packs of rival newspapermen on their trail, Fleming and his companions marched, canoed, and hacked through 3,000 miles of wilderness and alligator-ridden rivers in search of the fate of the lost explorer.
Originally published in 1936, News from Tartary is the story of a journey from Peking through the mysterious province of Sinkiang, to India. Fleming tells the story in his inimitable manner,...
Synge first traveled to the primitive, little-known Aran Islands in 1898. His trip proved to be a wonderfully fruitful and decisive experience. He then went back for part of each summer until 1902. The book that he wrote--and that he called his "first serious piece of work"--was published in 1907. In it, he said, he had found "the appropriate form through which to explore [his] own place in the universe." What he learned from the Aran Islands led directly to the great plays for which he is chiefly remembered.
Italian Journeys, published in 1867 and written during the four years Howells spent as an American consul in Venice, is more than a lively and entertaining book of travel. It is also a shrewd and perceptive inspection of persons and places European. On every page it interrogates European values while between every line it grapples with problems of American identity.
Arthur Symons's collection of twenty-six essays on travel in Spain, life in London, and sojourns among islands and sea-coasts of France, England, and Ireland first appeared in the United States in 1919. His verbal portraits of the places he visited, whether bold and colorful or sensitive and merely suggestive, are as intriguing and interesting today as when he first wrote them.
