Istanbul
Memories and the City
Written by Orhan Pamuk

Format: Trade Paperback, 400 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: July 11, 2006
Price: $16.95
ISBN: 978-1-4000-3388-1 (1-4000-3388-8)

A portrait, by turns intimate and panoramic, of one of the world’s great cities, by its foremost man of letters, author of the acclaimed novels Snow and My Name Is Red.

Blending reminiscence with history; family photographs with portraits of poets and pashas; art criticism, metaphysical musing, and, now and again, a... Read more >

Journey to the Vanished City
The Search for a Lost Tribe of Israel
Written by Tudor Parfitt

Format: Trade Paperback, 400 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: April 4, 2000
Price: $18.95
ISBN: 978-0-375-72454-1 (0-375-72454-0)

In a mixture of travel, adventure, and scholarship, historian Tudor Parfitt sets out in search of answers to a fascinating ethnological puzzle: is the Lemba tribe of Southern Africa really one of the lost tribes of Israel, descended from King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba?

Beginning in the Lemba villages in... Read more >

Pagan Holiday
On the Trail of Ancient Roman Tourists
Written by Tony Perrottet

Format: Trade Paperback, 416 pages
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
On Sale: April 8, 2003
Price: $13.95
ISBN: 978-0-375-75639-9 (0-375-75639-6)

The ancient Romans were responsible for many remarkable achievements—Roman numerals, straight roads—but one of their lesser-known contributions was the creation of the tourist industry. The first people in history to enjoy safe and easy travel, Romans embarked on the original Grand Tour, journeying from the lost city of Troy to the... Read more >

The Atlantic Sound

Written by Caryl Phillips

Format: Trade Paperback, 288 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: October 9, 2001
Price: $16.00
ISBN: 978-0-375-70103-0 (0-375-70103-6)

In this fascinating inquiry into the African Diaspora, Caryl Phillips embarks on a soul-wrenching journey to the three major ports of the transatlantic slave trade.

Juxtaposing stories of the past with his own present-day experiences, Phillips combines his remarkable skills as a travel essayist with an astute understanding of history. From... Read more >

France in Mind

Edited by Alice Leccese Powers

Format: Trade Paperback, 320 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: March 11, 2003
Price: $16.95
ISBN: 978-0-375-71435-1 (0-375-71435-9)

In her third literary Baedeker, Alice Leccese Powers—editor of Italy in Mind and Ireland in Mind—explores France through the senses and sensibilities of thirty-three British and American authors.

The food and the people, the culture and viniculture, the architecture and the expatriates, the pleasures (and frustrations) of France are described by intrepid... Read more >

Spain in Mind

Edited by Alice Leccese Powers

Format: Trade Paperback, 400 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: April 10, 2007
Price: $16.95
ISBN: 978-1-4000-7676-5 (1-4000-7676-5)

This spellbinding literary travel guide gathers poetry, nonfiction, and fiction about Spain by forty English and American writers.

Here are letters and memoirs from Lord Byron, Edith Wharton, and Henry James; a poem about Picasso by E. E. Cummings; and a comic tale by Anthony Trollope in which two Englishmen mistake a... Read more >

Tuscany in Mind

Edited by Alice Leccese Powers

Format: Trade Paperback, 400 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: May 17, 2005
Price: $14.95
ISBN: 978-1-4000-7675-8 (1-4000-7675-7)

In her fourth literary travel companion, Alice Leccese Powers explores one of the most seductive regions of the world through more than two centuries of fiction, poetry, essays, letters, and memoirs by English-speaking visitors to northern Italy.

The poet Shelley called Tuscany “a paradise of exiles”; it has long been a magnet... Read more >

The Pritchett Century
A Selection of the Best by V. S. Pritchett
Preface by V.S. Pritchett

Format: Trade Paperback, 736 pages
Publisher: Modern Library
On Sale: December 22, 1998
Price: $29.00
ISBN: 978-0-375-75217-9 (0-375-75217-X)

Selected and with a Foreword by Oliver Pritchett; Introduction by John Bayley

V.S. Pritchett was born in 1900 and died in 1997. In that time, he mastered nearly every form of literature during his long and illustrious career: the novel, short fiction, travel writing, biography, criticism, and memoir. Sir Victor's son, Oliver... Read more >

Bad Land
An American Romance
Written by Jonathan Raban

Format: Trade Paperback, 384 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: October 7, 1997
Price: $15.95
ISBN: 978-0-679-75906-5 (0-679-75906-9)

A New York Times Editors' Choice for Book of the Year
Winner of the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award
Winner of the PEN West Creative Nonfiction Award

In 1909 maps still identified eastern Montana as the Great American Desert. But in that year, Congress, lobbied heavily by railroad companies, offered 320-acre tracts of land to... Read more >

Old Glory
A Voyage Down the Mississippi
Written by Jonathan Raban

Format: Trade Paperback, 416 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: May 26, 1998
Price: $18.00
ISBN: 978-0-375-70100-9 (0-375-70100-1)

The author of Bad Land realizes a lifelong dream as he navigates the waters of the Mississippi River in a spartan sixteen-foot motorboat, producing yet another masterpiece of contemporary American travel writing. In the course of his voyage, Raban records the mercurial caprices of the river and the astonishingly varied lives... Read more >

Zen and Now
On the Trail of Robert Pirsig and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Written by Mark Richardson

Format: Trade Paperback, 288 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: September 8, 2009
Price: $15.00
ISBN: 978-0-307-39069-1 (0-307-39069-1)

Part travelogue, part meditation on an author and his work, Zen and Now is a tribute to a beloved American book and the landscape that inspired it.

Since it was first published in 1974, Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance has become a modern classic, a beautifully constructed blend... Read more >

Cairo
The City Victorious
Written by Max Rodenbeck

Format: Trade Paperback, 320 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: February 22, 2000
Price: $15.95
ISBN: 978-0-679-76727-5 (0-679-76727-4)

The seat of pharaohs and sultans, the prize of conquerors from Alexander to Napoleon, Cairo has never stopped reinventing itself. Even in this century, as Max Rodenbeck shows us, the city has transformed itself yet again--from a glamorous European outpost into the nationalistic capital of the Arab world. And, most recently... Read more >

Oaxaca Journal

Written by Oliver Sacks

Format: Trade Paperback, 176 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: March 6, 2012
Price: $14.95
ISBN: 978-0-307-94744-4 (0-307-94744-0)

Since childhood, Oliver Sacks has been fascinated by ferns: an ancient class of plants able to survive and adapt in many climates. Along with a delightful group of fellow fern aficionados—mathematicians, poets, artists, and assorted botanists and birders—he embarks on an exploration of Southern Mexico, a region that is also rich... Read more >

Iron and Silk

Written by Mark Salzman

Format: Trade Paperback, 224 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: October 12, 1987
Price: $15.00
ISBN: 978-0-394-75511-3 (0-394-75511-1)

Salzman captures post-Cultural Revolution China through his adventures as a young American English teacher in China and his shifu-tudi (master-student) relationship with China's foremost martial arts teacher.

"Salzman demonstrates with skill and subtlety just how Chinese society works."—The Washington Post

"Gong fu, or 'skill that transcends mere surface beauty'...no other term is as... Read more >

On Persephone's Island
A Sicilian Journal
Written by Mary Taylor Simeti

Format: Trade Paperback, 352 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: September 26, 1995
Price: $15.95
ISBN: 978-0-679-76414-4 (0-679-76414-3)

Read more >

On the Water
Discovering America in a Row Boat
Written by Nathaniel Stone

Format: Trade Paperback, 336 pages
Publisher: Broadway
On Sale: July 8, 2003
Price: $19.00
ISBN: 978-0-7679-0842-9 (0-7679-0842-2)

“I take a stroke and lean back, gazing up into the jet skies, bejeweled by the moon and the galaxies of stars. The hull glides in silence and with such perfect balance as to report no motion. I sit up for another stroke, now looking down as the blades ignite swirling... Read more >

Dinner with Persephone
Travels in Greece
Written by Patricia Storace

Format: Trade Paperback, 416 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: September 2, 1997
Price: $18.00
ISBN: 978-0-679-74478-8 (0-679-74478-9)

A New York Times Notable Book of the Year

"Full of insights, marvelously entertaining . . . haunting and beautifully written."—The New York Review of Books

"I lived in Athens, at the intersection of a prostitute and a saint." So begins Patricia Storace's astonishing memoir of her year in Greece. Mixing affection with... Read more >

Chasing Che
A Motorcycle Journey in Search of the Guevara Legend
Written by Patrick Symmes

Format: Trade Paperback, 320 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: February 15, 2000
Price: $15.00
ISBN: 978-0-375-70265-5 (0-375-70265-2)

In 1952, 24-year-old Ernesto Guevara and a friend left their native Argentina to motorcycle the back roads of South America.  Eight months later, Ernesto returned transformed.  The freewheeling youth had evolved into the man known as Che, and became the revolutionary who would later inspire followers from Cuba to Congo--an icon to this... Read more >

Cuba Diaries
An American Housewife in Havana
Written by Isadora Tattlin

Format: Trade Paperback, 320 pages
Publisher: Broadway
On Sale: May 13, 2003
Price: $15.00
ISBN: 978-0-7679-1484-0 (0-7679-1484-8)

Isadora Tattlin was accustomed to relocating often for her husband’s work. When he accepted a post in Cuba in the early 1990s, she resolved to keep a detailed diary of her time there, recording her daily experiences as a wife, mother, and foreigner in a land of contraband. The result is... Read more >

Stories of the Sea

Edited by Diana Secker Tesdell

Format: Hardcover, 416 pages
Publisher: Everyman's Library
On Sale: March 2, 2010
Price: $15.00
ISBN: 978-0-307-59265-1 (0-307-59265-0)

A gathering of the best maritime fiction from the last two hundred years: tales of shipwrecks and storms at sea, of creatures from the deep, of voyages that test human limits on the wild and limitless waters.

Classic adventures stories by Joseph Conrad, Rudyard Kipling, Stephen Crane, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Jack... Read more >

Alice, Let's Eat
Further Adventures of a Happy Eater
Written by Calvin Trillin

Format: Trade Paperback, 192 pages
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
On Sale: December 26, 2006
Price: $12.95
ISBN: 978-0-8129-7806-3 (0-8129-7806-4)

In this delightful and delicious book, Calvin Trillin, guided by an insatiable appetite, embarks on a hilarious odyssey in search of “something decent to eat.” Across time zones and cultures, and often with his wife, Alice, at his side, Trillin shares his triumphs in the art of culinary discovery, including Dungeness... Read more >

Feeding a Yen
Savoring Local Specialties, from Kansas City to Cuzco
Written by Calvin Trillin

Format: Trade Paperback, 216 pages
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
On Sale: May 11, 2004
Price: $15.00
ISBN: 978-0-375-75996-3 (0-375-75996-4)

Calvin Trillin has never been a champion of the “continental cuisine” palaces he used to refer to as La Maison de la Casa House. What he treasures is the superb local specialty. And he will go anywhere to find one. As it happens, some of his favorite dishes can be found... Read more >

Searching for Hassan
A Journey to the Heart of Iran
Written by Terence Ward

Format: Trade Paperback, 352 pages
Publisher: Anchor
On Sale: March 4, 2003
Price: $17.95
ISBN: 978-1-4000-3223-5 (1-4000-3223-7)

The unique culture of Iran and the sweep of its history are revealed in this evocative travelogue of an American family searching for a lost friend in the country of their youth.

Growing up in Tehran in the 1960s, Terence Ward and his brothers were watched over by Hassan, the family’s cook... Read more >

Terra Incognita
Travels in Antarctica
Written by Sara Wheeler

Format: Trade Paperback, 384 pages
Publisher: Modern Library
On Sale: March 16, 1999
Price: $15.00
ISBN: 978-0-375-75338-1 (0-375-75338-9)

It is the coldest, windiest, driest place on earth, an icy desert of unearthly beauty and stubborn impenetrability. For centuries, Antarctica has captured the imagination of our greatest scientists and explorers, lingering in the spirit long after their return. Shackleton called it "the last great journey"; for Apsley Cherry-Garrard it was... Read more >

Travels in a Thin Country
A Journey Through Chile
Written by Sara Wheeler

Format: Trade Paperback, 336 pages
Publisher: Modern Library
On Sale: March 16, 1999
Price: $15.00
ISBN: 978-0-375-75365-7 (0-375-75365-6)

Squeezed between a vast ocean and the longest mountain range on earth, Chile is 2,600 miles long and never more than 110 miles wide—not a country that lends itself to maps, as Sara Wheeler discovered when she traveled alone from the top to the bottom, from the driest desert in the... Read more >