Wanderlust: Real-Life Tales of Adventure and Romance

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. (Nov.)