Author Description

Travel--long associated with marvels and adventure, excitement and mystery--has always proved an irresistible literary subject. Now, in The Oxford Book of Travel Stories, Patricia Craig brings together thirty-two fascinating travel stories, with each one illustrating in its own way what travel has to do with stimulus, enrichment, and a sense of achievement. Here is some of the best short fiction representing the most exhilarating subjects from writers as diverse as Ring Lardner, Anthony Trollope, Edith Wharton, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, John Updike, David Malouf, Rebecca West, Rachel Ingalls, Evelyn Waugh, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Jack Kerouac, Alice Adams, Flannery O'Connor, John Cheever, and Raymond Carver.Readers will revel in atmospheres as sundry as the Riviera in the 1920s, nineteenth-century Palestine, a journey by train from Brisbane to Sydney in 1944 (David Malouf's The Kyogle Line), a tread through the English midlands (Elizabeth Bowen's Human Habitation), a mid-Atlantic crossing between New York and Naples (John Cheever's Brimmer), and Ring Lardner's Travelogue, set on a train, mildly satirical in tone, concerning bragging about travel--in many ways the last word on travel. From Jack Kerouac's Big Trip to Europe, of 1960, which encapsulates the late 1950s fecklessness and the soft-drug related styles of indolence abroad to F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald's Show Mr. and Mrs. F to Number ____, a mood-piece about exotic hotel life in the 1920s, to Flannery O'Connor's A Good Man is Hard to Find, a high-spirited, productively unsettling jaunt, The Oxford Book of Travel Stories brilliantly encompasses the travel story genre.The Oxford Book of Travel Stories is a superb collection that captures the freedoms and excitements of travel as it celebrates great literary style. It will delight both readers and travelers for which travel provides a means of escape.