The Oxford Book of Travel Stories - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0192142534 ISBN 13: 9780192142535

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 1996

Synopsis

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.

About this title

Review

Travel stories inspire travel, and travel thrives on travel stories. So when you pack for your European jaunt, you'd do well to include Patricia Craig's anthology of travel stories. It includes excerpts by Charles Dickens, stories by Edith Wharton, Evelyn Waugh, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jack Kerouac, Anita Desai, and Paul Theroux, Raymond Carver, Elizabeth Bishop, and 24 more seasoned and superb writers. It features snippets of London, Scotland and Greece, Paris, Germany and Morocco. The stories reach from the English Midlands to Bombay, Malaysia, and China, from 19th-century Palestine to the Riviera of the 1920s and Switzerland in the 1990s. The two common threads are travel and quality writing, and they make for delightful reading on that flight to Greece or that train across France.

About the Author

About the Editor:
A freelance writer and reviewer,Patricia Craig has edited The Oxford Book of English Detective Stories, The Oxford Book of Schooldays, and The Oxford Book of Modern Women's Stories.

About this edition

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0192142534
• ISBN 13: 9780192142535
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 458
• Editor: Craig Patricia