Wanderlust
Real-Life Tales of Adventure and Romance
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- $6.99
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
Wanderlust: Real-Life Tales of Adventure and Romance includes these forty-one scintillating and sizzling tales of serendipity:
“On the Amazon” by Isabel Allende
“Once Upon a Time in Italy” by Bill Barich
“Naxos Nights” by Laurie Gough
“Passionate and Penniless in Paris” by Maxine Rose Schur
“Sleeping with Elephants” by Don Meredith
“Romance in Romania” by Simon Winchester
“Looking for Abdelati” by Tanya Shaffer
“Special Delivery” by Lindsy van Gelder
“England’s Decadent Delights” by Douglas Cruickshank
“I Lost It at Club Med” by Po Bronson
“Absinthe Makes the Heart Grow” by Taras Grescoe
“Where the Hula Goddess Lives” by James D. Houston
“In a French Cave” by Beth Kephart
“How to Buy a Turkish Rug” by Laura Billings
“The Dangers of Provence” by Peter Mayle
“Hog Heaven: At the Memphis World Championship Barbecue Cooking Contest” by David Kohn
“Philosophy Au Lait” by David Downie
“Your Money’s No Good Here” by Tim Cahill
“Embraced in Spain” by Barry Yeoman
“Italian Affair” by Laura Fraser
“Tampax Nightmares” by Susan Hack
“On Japanese Trains” by Sallie Tisdale
“Oscar Night in Angkor Wat” by Jeff Greenwald
“The Last Tourist in Mozambique” by Mary Roach
“Inside Colombia” by Dawn MacKeen
“Fade into Blue” by Amanda Jones
“Navigating Nairobi” by Alicia Rebensdorf
“Out of Africa” by Wendy Belcher
“The Man Who Loved Books in Turkey” by Lisa Michaels
“The Meaning of Gdańsk” by Jan Morris
“How Zurich Invented the Modern World” by Carlos Fuentes
“Storming The Beach” by Rolf Potts
“Conquering Half Dome” by Don George
“Looking for Mr. Watson” by Bill Belleville
“Bewitched on Bali” by Pico Iyer
“Lost in the Sahara” by Jeffrey Tayler
“Fear, Drugs, and Soccer in Asia” by Karl Taro Greenfield
“My Junior Year Abroad” by Edith Pearlman
“Expatriate, with Olives” by Lucy McCauley
“The Aussie Way of Wanderlust” by Tony Wheeler
“When We’re Going to Be There” by Chris Colin
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Since Salon.com shut down its Wanderlust section earlier this year (there weren't enough page views to satisfy investors) and since George, the section's editor, has been reduced to contributing a weekly column, this collection preserves in print articles that were likely to become Internet ephemera. The 40 stories are tuned for the computer-screen reader: they are all quick, attention-grabbing, first-person narratives--as short and direct as a shot of espresso. One-third come from well-known writers, including a handful of brand-name travel writers such as Jan Morris, Peter Mayle, Pico Iyer, Tim Cahill and even Tony Wheeler, the founder of the Lonely Planet guidebooks. The others come from Salon's multifaceted contributors, many of whom have published books of their own. The best work here uses irony to convey the complex nature of travel in the age of the Internet, when much of the world is only a mouse click away. Rolf Potts's story "Storming the Beach," for example, contains daily e-mail dispatches about the author's attempt to replicate the events of Alex Garland's novel The Beach by substituting the fictional beach with the actual Thai beach where a film of the novel is being shot. "The Last Tourist in Mozambique" details Mary Roach's discovery that it is easier to get the country's president to talk about transcendental meditation than it is to convert dollars into local currency. Salon has always been a self-consciously literary Web site, so it is no surprise that these stories survive the transition from the computer screen to the printed page. But the shutdown of the site's Wanderlust section may limit the readership for this pleasant anthology.
