Travel Essays

After 40+ years of writing about Europe, Rick Steves has gathered 100 of his favorite memories together into one inspiring collection: For the Love of Europe: My Favorite Places, People, and Stories. Join Rick as he's swept away by a fado singer in Lisbon, learns the dangers of falling in love...

John Gierach demonstrates once again that fishing, when done right, is as much a philosophical pursuit as a sport. Gierach travels to Wyoming and Maine and points in between, searching out new fly-fishing adventures and savoring familiar waters with old friends. Along the way he meditates on the importance of good guides, the challenge of salmon fishing, and the zen of fishing alone. On a more serious note, he ponders the damaging effects of disasters both natural and man-made.

In the vein of Lebowitz's acclaimed Netflix limited series, Pretend It's a City—The Fran Lebowitz Reader brings together two of the famed author's bestsellers, Metropolitan Life and Social Studies. In "elegant, finely honed prose" (The Washington Post Book World), Lebowitz limns the...

Every summer for two decades, Ted Leeson and a maverick group of close companions have returned to an old ranch house on the bench-land overlooking the Madison River. Trout and fly fishing may be at the heart of their ritual return, but their experience goes far beyond the fishing. Leeson contemplates both the human and natural landscape brilliantly....

A classic of modern travel writing, An Area of Darkness is Nobel Laureate V. S. Naipaul’s profound reckoning with his ancestral homeland and an extraordinarily perceptive chronicle of his first encounter with India. Traveling from the bureaucratic morass of Bombay to the ethereal beauty of Kashmir, from a sacred ice cave in the Himalayas to an abandoned temple near Madras, Naipaul encounters a dizzying cross-section of humanity: browbeaten government workers and imperious servants, a suavely self-serving holy man, and a deluded American religious seeker.

A fascinating exploration of the science of the impossible—from death rays and force fields to invisibility cloaks—revealing to what extent such technologies might be achievable decades or millennia into the future. One hundred years ago, scientists would have said that lasers, televisions...

These essays recount his adventures alone and with friends, taking listeners through the seasons. In Paulsen’s north country, every expedition is a major one, and often hilarious. Once again Gary Paulsen demonstrates why he is one of America’s most beloved writers, for he shows us fishing and hunting as pleasure, as art, as companionship, and as source of life’s deepest lessons.

From the author of The Secret Knowledge of Water and Atlas of a Lost World comes a deeply felt essay collection focusing upon a vivid series of desert icons - a sheet of virga over Monument Valley, white seashells in dry desert sand, boulders impossibly balanced. Craig Childs delves into the primacy of the land and the profound nature of the more-than-human.

In No Shortage of Good Days John Gierach takes listeners from the Smokies in Tennessee to his home waters in Colorado, from the Canadian Maritimes to Mexico - saltwater or fresh, it's all fishing and all irresistible. As always he writes perceptively about a wide range of subjects: the charm of familiar waters, the etiquette of working with new fishing guides, night fishing when the trout and the mosquitoes are both biting, and fishing snobbery, a pitfall he seems to have largely avoided.

In this New York Times bestseller, follow the author of The Notebook as he travels the world with his brother learning about faith, loss, connection, and hope. As moving as his bestselling works of fiction, Nicholas Sparks's unique memoir, written with his brother, chronicles the life-affirming...

Between 1821 and 1826, the prolific writer and journalist William Cobbett travelled the countryside of the South of England on foot and horseback. Rural Rides is a fascinating account of his journeys, and depicts a way of life in transition, juxtaposing lyrical descriptions of the countryside with criticism of the poverty of agricultural workers. A man of radical politics who encouraged the rural rising of 1830, Cobbett went on to become MP for Oldham and sought to represent the interests of both industrial and agricultural workers. Above all, Rural Rides celebrates agrarian England.

In the 17 wide-ranging essays collected for the first time in Love and Other Ways of Dying, he brings his full literary powers to bear, pondering happiness and grief, memory and the redemptive power of human connection. In the remote Ukranian countryside, Paterniti picks apples (and faces mortality) with a real-life giant; in Nanjing, China, he confronts a distraught jumper on a suicide bridge.

In this engaging audio edition, find out why Wilderness Essays is the top-selling book by John Muir. Wilderness Essays is an essential collection of the finest essays ever written by the “Father of the National Parks.” An ardent outdoorsman, a gifted writer, a dedicated preservationist, and a spiritual beacon, John Muir conveys here the boundless love and wonder of the natural world that drove his critically important work.

Paesaggi, umori, incontri, riflessioni, racconti di un viaggiatore sterniano che scende con pietas e con humour lungo il vecchio fiume, dalle sorgenti al Mar Nero, ripercorrendo insieme la propria vita e le stagioni della cultura contemporanea, le sue fedi e le sue inquietudini. Un itinerario fra romanzo e saggio che racconta la cultura come esperienza esistenziale e ricostruisce a mosaico, attraverso i luoghi visitati e interrogati, le civiltà dell'Europa centrale - in tutta la complessa varietà dei suoi popoli e delle sue culture.

Here, in this unusual collection, are some of the greatest essays in Western literature. Witty, informative and imaginative, the topics vary from starvation in Ireland, fine China, the extension of railways in the Lake District, and the tombs in Westminster Abbey. A little like after-dinner monologues, they are passing thoughts expressed as journalism. Neville Jason reads with urbane clarity.

Why do people love trains so much? Tom Chesshyre is on a mission to find the answer by experiencing the world through train travel - on both epic and everyday rail routes, aboard every type of ride, from steam locomotives to bullet trains, meeting a cast of memorable characters who share a passion for train travel. Join him on the rails and off the beaten track as he embarks on an exhilarating whistle-stop tour around the globe, on journeys on celebrated trains and railways.

The Charles Dickens Non-Fiction Collection contains all of Charles Dickens' major published works of non-fiction. Although lesser known than the novels for which he is remembered, Dickens' eye for detail and character observation is seen just as clearly in his travelogues, essays, and letters, giving us an insight into Dickens and 1800s London, America, and Europe.

New Yorker writer and author of The Library Book takes readers on a series of remarkable journeys in this uniquely witty, sophisticated, and far-flung travel book. In this irresistible collection of adventures far and near, Orlean conducts a tour of the world via its subcultures, from the heart...

New York Times bestselling author Jim Harrison (1937-2016) was a writer with a poet’s economy of style and trencherman’s appetites and ribald humor. In The Search for the Genuine, a collection of new and previously published essays, the giant of letters muses on everything from grouse hunting and fishing to Zen Buddhism and matters of the spirit, including reported pieces on Yellowstone and shark-tagging in the open ocean, commentary on writers from Bukowski to Neruda to Peter Matthiessen, and a heartbreaking essay on life on the US/Mexico border.

A collection of non-fiction essays about the counter-culture of the 1960s that dives deep into the issues that marked the era: female empowerment, increasing freedom around sexuality, vibrant subcultures, and the rise of psychedelic drugs. In this sprawling work, Wolfe profiles Playboy founder Hugh Hefner and compares him to Jay Gatsby, interviews one of the first women to get breast implants, and hangs out with freewheeling surfers (aka The Pump House Gang).