Beneath My Feet

Praise

“Beneath My Feet gathers 36 testimonies to walking’s invigorating literary power. Writers from Petrarch to Franz Kafka to Will Self have recorded their enthusiasm for, in Minshull’s words, ‘ambling, rambling, tramping, trekking, stomping and striding.’ Higher-quality endorsements of the creative value of walking than these would be hard to find.” —Michael LaPointe, The Atlantic

“Here is a book as certain to lift the spirits as the activity to which it is dedicated: going for a walk. Beneath My Feet is a collection of writings on pedestrianism, shrewdly selected by Duncan Minshull, who, as the editor of two previous books on the subject, is emerging as the laureate of walking.” —Andrew Martin, Country Life

“Beneath My Feet aligns nicely with Notting Hill’s mission, since walking and essay-writing both freely indulge the pleasures of digression. . . . This volume’s modesty of scale, as it turns out, is a plus. It’s small enough to slip in a jacket or knapsack — a portable book that can, providently, be taken out for a walk. The abiding message of Beneath My Feet is that reading, like walking and writing, is an unending source of surprise.” —Danny Heitman, The Christian Science Monitor

“We at the Idler are great fans of Notting Hill Editions, an independent publisher of beautiful hardback essay collections. In Beneath My Feet: Writers on Walking, the latest addition to their catalogue, radio producer and editor Dunan Minshull brings together writing on walking from Petrarch to the present day. Follow in the footsteps of George Sand, Robert Louis Stevenson, Virginia Woolf, Will Self and others, and discover why they saw walking as key to their creativity and wellbeing. As St. Augustine puts it, ‘solvitur ambulando’—it is solved by walking.” —Idler

“A beguiling panorama of wanderers from different eras and geographies. . . Like his subjects, Minshull wanders, lifting contributions from people all over the literary map: philosophers, novelists, essayists, critics, children’s authors. . . . [His] goal, one gathers, is less to trace a historiography of the rambler than to expand the genre of flânerie, with an open-endedness true to its spirit.” —Alejandro Chacoff, The New Yorker