In the first sentence of the first essay in this collection, Geoff Dyer confesses that on his way to French Polynesia to write about Gauguin he somehow lost his copy of David Sweetman’s biography of the artist. As travel writer failings go, it pales in comparison to Karl Ove Knausgaard's arriving…
The old droll definition of an Argentine—an Italian who speaks Spanish, lives in a French house, and thinks he's an English gentleman—does not appear anywhere in Buenos Aires: The Biography of a City. James Gardner's history of the Argentine capital is a serious work that, inevitably, brings that…
All writers begin as readers, and the majority, the ones worth reading, continue life as more prolific readers than writers—especially, it seems, as they age. “In my seventh decade I feel a new haste,” Larry McMurtry wrote in Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen (1999), “not to write, but to read.”…
It is occasionally noted that Florida has replaced California as the legitimate home of the nation’s nuts, but what is left unmentioned is that Floridians, unlike Californians, embrace the title—sort of the way England cherishes its eccentrics, though they are generally a more lovable group.
Oh, the writers! They came to Tangier in boatloads, getting—many of them—their first taste of Africa and Islam. Though over time, the great allure of Tangier for writers became other writers.
Tim Parks has followed in that predominantly British literary tradition of making another country one’s home and then making that home one’s principal subject. Gerald Brenan chose Spain; Lawrence Durrell and Patrick Leigh Fermor shared Greece; William Dalrymple has claimed India. For the last three…
There are roads that are as storied as rivers, though the reasons for their notoriety are much more varied. The Silk Road (which was really a collection of roads) stands forever as a conduit, of goods and ideas, between East and West. The Tokaido lives on, in the prints of Hiroshige, as a pastoral…
Wanderlust
Last year I gave a reading in New York City, and talking to people afterwards I was struck by how many were also travel writers, or at least survivors of a travel-writing course. It was refreshing to be around literate travelers. At home in Florida I usually address seniors, who like to ask me…
Nocturne
Contact!
Hammer and Tickle
Right now millions of Americans are thinking: staycation.
My Two Polish Grandfathers
"Location, location, location," as everyone knows, is the appropriately redundant rule of contemporary travel writing. It's proven in every bookstore, where titles on Italy and France sometimes outnumber those on the rest of the world combined.
Travel writers, regularly dismissed as trivialists, rarely indulge in the popular book tour whine. It's not just that we have bigger trips to fry, we have fewer bones to pick. We don't see what novelists find so objectionable about a diet of fine hotels, especially when the rooms all come reserved…
The 8:55 to Baghdad