The Best Women's Travel Writing, Volume 12: True Stories from Around the World

by Lavinia Spalding (Editor)

Overview

As Andrew McCarthy wrote in The New York Times Book Review, “For more than 20 years, Travelers’ Tales has been publishing books that might best be described as the literary equivalent of a group of travelers sitting around a dim cafe, sipping pints or prosecco and trading their best stories.”

Now, new from Travelers’ Tales comes The Best Women’s Travel Writing, Volume 12: True Stories from Around the World—the latest collection in the best-selling, award-winning series that invites you to ride shotgun alongside intrepid female nomads as they wander the globe discovering new places, faces, and facets of themselves.

“In story after story,” McCarthy wrote about the previous volume of The Best Women’s Travel Writing, “the refreshing absence of bluster and bravado, coupled with the optimism necessary for bold travel, create a unifying narrative that testifies to the personal value and cultural import of leaving the perceived safety of home and setting out into the wider world.”

The essays in this volume are as diverse as the destinations, exploring themes of kindness, transformation, nature, friendship, family, strength, and resilience.

In The Best Women’s Travel Writing, Volume 12, you will…

Settle a thirteen-year debt in Cuba

Learn to survive in the polar regions of Canada

Witness an amateur autopsy in Ireland

Get chloroformed, robbed, read to, and propositioned in Italy

Summit Kilimanjaro in Tanzania

Get lost and found on a dark and rainy morning in northern France

Find joy in Azerbaijan while walking across two continents

Explain American reality TV to a bewildered bunch in Bolivia

Fear for your life on a stormy Adriatic Sea

Bear witness at the site of a volcano disaster in Indonesia

Contemplate the perils of too much safety in Nepal

Get conned and taken for a ride in Colombia

Track one of the world’s most elusive animals in India

Travel the world on stolen plane tickets

Outgrow nihilism and embrace friendship at a convent in Spain …and much more!

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781609521899
Publisher:	Travelers' Tales Guides, Incorporated
Publication date:	11/24/2020
Series:	Best Women's Travel Writing
Pages:	328
Sales rank:	407,738
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.80(d)
Age Range:	15 Years

About the Author

Lavinia Spalding has edited five previous volumes of The Best Women's Travel Writing. She is also the author of Writing Away: A Creative Guide to Awakening the Journal-Writing Traveler and With a Measure of Grace, the Story and Recipes of a Small Town Restaurant, and she introduced the reissued e-book edition of Edith Wharton's classic travelogue, A Motor-Flight Through France. Her writing appears in numerous print and online publications, including Sunset, Yoga Journal, San Francisco magazine, The San Francisco Chronicle, Tin House, and The Best Travel Writing. She lives in New Orleans.

Editorial Reviews

A contemplative break from daily life…a wise and affectionate collection.” —Clarion Reviews ★★★★★

From the Publisher

2020-12-22
An anthology takes armchair travelers from Florida to Finland.

Readers can enjoy an embarrassment of riches in this 12th installment of a series showcasing women’s travel writing. The book, edited by Spalding, voyages from Bhutan to Bolivia in a quest for adventure and, in several essays, explores “some of the questions and contradictions we face as travelers.” “Is animal-based tourism just another form of human consumption, causing more damage than good?” asks Jill K. Robinson about her trek to India’s Himalayas in search of sightings of snow leopards. “While resources and attention from visitors around the world assist conservation efforts and lend awareness to dwindling animal habitat, humankind’s appetite for remote places and attempted dominion over the animal kingdom contributes to the problem.” Environmental issues indeed inform some of the best stories, including Rahawa Haile’s superb recollection of her return to her childhood haunts in the Florida Keys. Surveying the damage to a state park from Hurricane Irma, she wonders: “How long can a state as susceptible to climate change as Florida continue to bet against itself by electing politicians who refuse to grapple with its vulnerability? We may very well be living in the dismantling, you and I, whether we choose to watch or not.” The collection features plenty of humor—“I had never been so excited to smell cat pee,” Robinson writes of her leopard tracking—and some of the dark side of travel. Diane LeBow was chloroformed and robbed on a train in Italy; Suzanne Roberts was relentlessly propositioned on Santorini; and a White innkeeper in Mexico tugged at Jacqueline Luckett’s Afro, saying: “Such a contrast to horse-haired Mexicans.” As with any anthology, there are some misses to go along with the hits. Anna Vodicka’s piece on watching reality TV in a Bolivian hostel is so trifling readers will wonder why it was included. And Audrey Ferber’s interweaving of a trip to Florence with memories of her mother takes contrivance too far. But Shannon Leone Fowler’s soggy backpacking trip to Ireland captures the quintessence of travel: that “feeling of something genuine—knowing you’re lucky to be in exactly that place at exactly that instant.”

A wide-ranging and bracing collection of travel pieces.

Kirkus Reviews