Journeys

– An anthology –

“Explorers, pilgrims, fugitives, drifters, sun-seekers, back-packers. Lost cities, disappearing tribes, desert islands, dusky maidens. To see what’s round the corner, to reach the ends of the earth, to learn that after all ‘… the end of all our exploring/Will be to arrive where we started/And know the place for the fist time.’

Whatever the mode or motivations of travel, there is nothing like a journey to get people reaching for their pens, if only to write the old lie, ‘Wish you were here!’. The rich and ancient tradition of travel-writing bears witness to the tonic effect of travel on our eyes, ears and minds.

In this highly personal anthology, Charles Nicholl samples the literature of travel from Herodotus to Hunter S. Thompson. We journey with the Japanese haiku master Basho and the eccentric Jacobean ‘leg-stretcher’ Thomas Coryate. We teeter on the brink of that elusive ‘perfect  moment’ with New York monologist Spalding Grey. We glimpse a giant on the shores of Patagonia and a Panama hat floating off Black Diamond Bay. We savour the enchantments and discomforts of being somewhere else …”