Better Than Fiction: True Travel Tales from Great Fiction Writers

This refreshing compilation of 32 travel essays by some of the world's best-known fiction writers offers intimate and offbeat impressions of places near and far. Included in this gem of a book are works by many familiar stylists, including Peter Matthiessen, Joyce Carol Oates, Frances Mayes, Pico Iyer, Jan Morris, and Kurt Anderson; others such as Saudi-born Keija Parssinen, 2005 Orange Prize for Fiction winner Marina Lewycka, and Booker- and Whitbread-prize winner DBC Pierre are less well-known but hardly less accomplished. Snaking around the globe via multiple modes of transport, the storytellers explore the Solomon Islands, the American highway, central Mexico, San Quentin prison, Antarctica, the Watts Towers, Malawi, the Sudan, and Bear Trap Canyon near Bozeman, Mont. (Nov.)