Travel Essays

In this memorable account of 17 trips he made to Hawaii's North Shore starting in 1974, Bruce Jenkins, considered the Kerouac of surf writers, profiles the area's elite, the superstars who live to conquer Hawaii's deadliest waves. Here are the egoists, stylists, gladiators, and purists of the sport, from big-wave greats Darrick Doerner and Mark Foo to bodysurfer Mark Cunningham and bodyboarder Mike Stewart.

In 1994, retired CBS correspondent Charles Kuralt set out to spend a perfect year in America - traveling to his 12 favorite American places, in just the right month for a visit to each. With his well-known warmth, humor, and insight, he shows them to us now in Charles Kuralt's America.

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.

Anthony Bourdain chases the fumigation truck in Bergen County, New Jersey. Dave Eggers tells it straight: Illinois is Number 1. Louise Erdrich loses her bikini top in North Dakota. Jonathan Franzen gets waylaid by New York's publicist...and personal attorney...and historian...and geologist. John Hodgman explains why there is no such thing as a "Massachusettsean."

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.

As a young woman, Kate Betts nursed a dream of striking out on her own in a faraway place and becoming a glamorous foreign correspondent. After college—and not without trepidation—she took off for Paris, renting a room in the apartment of a young BCBG (bon chic, bon genre) family and throwing herself into the local culture. She was determined to master French slang, style, and savoir faire, and to find a job that would give her a reason to stay.

When one opens this audiobook, they step into another world and place, and even on occasions, another time. No matter what you may know about the lower Big Bend or think you know about the lower Big Bend, here are thoughts, maps, and photographs that bring together a heretofore unachieved mosaic of this rugged, lonesome land. In effect, Out There is a work that others simply cannot compare to.

Christian Beamish, a former editor at The Surfer's Journal, envisioned a low-tech, self-reliant exploration for surf along the coast of North America, using primarily clothes and instruments available to his ancestors, and the 18-foot boat he would build by hand in his garage. How the vision met reality - and how the two came to shape each other - places The Voyage of the Cormorant in the great American tradition of tales of life at sea, and what it has to teach us.

For more than a decade, Jay McInerney’s vinous essays, now featured in The Wall Street Journal, have been praised by restaurateurs (“Filled with small courses and surprising and exotic flavors, educational and delicious at the same time” —Mario Batali), by esteemed critics (“Brilliant, witty, comical, and often shamelessly candid and provocative” —Robert M. Parker Jr.), and by the media (“His wine judgments are sound, his anecdotes witty, and his literary references impeccable” — The New York Times).

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.

Spread over 15 of the country’s 28 states, India’s Maoist movement is now one of the world’s biggest and most sophisticated extreme-left movements. Hardly a week passes without people dying in strikes and counter-strikes by the Maoists - interchangeably known as the Naxalites - and the police and paramilitary forces.

It started as a simple journal exercise. Tom Sullivan wanted to list his top 10 favorite hunting, fishing, and climbing trips. Once completed, however, he noted something he found quite interesting. The majority of the excursions he noted didn't result in a harvest of fin or fur, nor did they remind him of any found and conquered summit. Instead, he had selected past trips where something remarkable had occurred and valuable lessons had been learned. This became the inspiration for his first collection of adventure essays.

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.

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.

Essays, observations and stories about Pattaya and Thailand - humorous, satiric, observational.

Tony Wheeler, travel addict, Lonely Planet founder and intrepid traveller over five decades, has discovered that the more you travel, the more extraordinary the world becomes. His enthusiasm for trekking the globe is contagious: it is impossible to listen to On Travel without scouring for deals, searching for unusual places and deciding to leave the luggage behind in an escape to the unfamiliar.

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.

世界24カ国で5000人に本格手打ち讃岐うどんを振る舞った「世界を旅するうどん屋」とはどういう生き方なのか？を綴った自伝。

A Month of Sundays: The New Mexico Columns is a collection of columns from writer Harry Musselwhite's work with The Rome News-Tribune (Rome, Georgia). The book is a tribute to the beauty, landscape, and atmosphere of the American Southwest.

This book is the first volume of a collection of RoadRUNNER travelogues created by James T. Parks, which focus on locations and routes steeped in American history. Jim’s original articles are scattered piecemeal throughout various RoadRUNNER bimonthly issues, spanning more than a decade of time. With that in mind, we have updated information, where feasible, that appeared in the original articles. Listeners who are interested in how America came to be what it is today will find this integrated collection of historically themed adventures of particular interest.