Award-winning novelists, travel writers, and others offer idiosyncratic impressions of travel and what it means to leave home.
Ice Diaries
Jean McNeil (ECW, Mar.)
Blending travelogue and memoir, novelist and short story writer McNeil examines her time in Antarctica as a writer in residence with the British Antarctic Survey, reflecting on the psychological and emotional effects of climate.
The Wonder Trail
Steve Hely (Dutton, Mar.)
Hely, a writer for 30 Rock and American Dad! and a recipient of the Thurber Prize for American Humor, recalls the overland journey he took from Los Angeles to the tip of South America, and the offbeat characters he encountered along the way.
City Squares
Edited by Catie Marron (Harper, May)
Following Marron’s City Parks (Harper, 2013), this collection includes essays from novelist Zadie Smith, New Yorker editor David Remnick, and science writer Rebecca Skloot, among others, on public commons in cities from New York to Cape Town.
White Sands
Geoff Dyer (Pantheon, May)
This latest category defier by Dyer (Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It) takes readers into Beijing’s Forbidden City, New Mexico’s Lightning Field (a site-specific artwork using the natural landscape), and other places, in a meditation on “what a certain place—a certain way of marking the landscape—means.”
Elephant Complex
John Gimlette (Quercus, May)
Gimlette, a winner of the Shiva Naipaul Memoiral Prize for travel writing, recounts his time in Sri Lanka and his encounters with its luminaries and everyday citizens, offering a window to the nation’s tumultuous history.
Voyager
Russell Banks (Ecco, June)
These essays by Banks (The Sweet Hereafter), which touch on journeys to the Caribbean, the Himalayas, and more, reveal what the novelist calls his longing “for rejuvenation, for wealth untold, for erotic and narcotic and sybaritic fresh starts.”
How to Travel Without Seeing
Andrés Neuman, trans. from the Spanish by Jeffrey
Lawrence (Restless, July)
In a playful spin on the travel narrative, Argentine novelist Neuman offers a whirlwind travelogue of Latin America as experienced from airplanes, airports, and hotel rooms—places that exemplify what the author calls the “not seeing” involved in so much contemporary globe-trotting.
