Books
Lonely Planet: ‘A Moveable Feast’
Lonely Planet’s 2010 collection, A Moveable Feast: Life-Changing Food Adventures Around the World, was edited by Don George and features stories from Anthony Bourdain, Simon Winchester, Pico Iyer, Doug Mack and others. It includes “Tijuana Terroir,” a piece I wrote about eating at one of my favorite spots south of the border.
From the promo material:
From bat on the island of Fais to chicken on a Russian train to barbecue in the American heartland, from mutton in Mongolia to couscous in Morocco to tacos in Tijuana – on the road, food nourishes us not only physically, but intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually too. It can be a gift that enables a traveller to survive, a doorway into the heart of a tribe, or a thread that weaves an indelible tie; it can be awful or ambrosial – and sometimes both at the same time. Celebrate the riches and revelations of food with this 38-course feast of true tales set around the world.
Lonely Planet Guide to Travel Writing
I’m among the editors and writers featured in interviews in the 2009 edition of the excellent Lonely Planet Guide to Travel Writing, written by Don George. It offers one of the most realistic assessments I’ve seen of the pleasures and challenges of the travel writing business.
From the promo material:
Written by a pre-eminent travel writer and bursting with invaluable advice, this inspiring and practical guide is a must for anyone who has ever yearned to turn their travels into saleable tales. Packed with insider hints and tips, practical writing exercises and examples of travel writing excellence, this guide helps bring the dream job of Travel Writer within scribbling distance of reality.
Travelers’ Tales: ‘Best Travel Writing 2007′
Smackdown in Tijuana, my story about enjoying some chair-slamming lucha libre Mexican wrestling in Tijuana, appears in Travelers’ Tales’ The Best Travel Writing 2007: True Stories from Around the World. The anthology features 29 stories, including pieces by Paul Theroux, Rory Stewart and Karin Muller.
Wrote Tony Wheeler in the introduction:
It’s by traveling that we meet people and come face to face with how they see the world or, even better, start to see how the world looks from their viewpoint and begin to understand why they think the way they do. We’re much less likely to discover that alternative perspective by sitting at home and watching the news on TV.
So many of the tales in this collection are reminders of this other essential truth: that it’s at ground level, in the streets, where we have the best hope of making that connection.
Lonely Planet: ‘Tales From Nowhere’
My story “Thailand Dreaming” appears in the anthology edited by Don George and published in September 2006. Contributors include Pico Iyer, Simon Winchester, Jeffrey Tayler, Tim Cahill and Rolf Potts.
From the book: “We’ve all been to Nowhere. It might have been in the middle of Borneo or Beijing. It might have been in a Mayan mountain village, along a time-worn trail in Tuscany, on an isolated South Pacific island, or under a desert moon in Mali. Nowhere is a setting, a situation and a state of mind. It’s not on any map, but you know it when you’ve been there.” The stories “all celebrate and illuminate one simple truth: if we embark on each adventure with an open heart and an open mind, travel will take us places we never planned to go, and enrich and englighten us in ways we never otherwise would have known.”
My own Nowhere was a Sizzler restaurant, of all things, in southern Thailand.
More: Tales from Nowhere: Unexpected Stories from Unexpected Places
Travelers’ Tales: ‘What Color is Your Jockstrap?’
My story, “Lust in Translation,” about an unusual phone call to my hotel room in China, appears in the humor anthology edited by Jennifer Leo. The book also includes stories by Tim Cahill, Rolf Potts, Elliott Hester and Frank Bures.
From the introduction: The book features “a diverse cross-section of misadventures. Some share the bizarre stories of travelers who went to the ends of the earth only to have the cosmos spit in their face, while others are the tales of typical travel challenges — just the sort of thing even rookie travelers can relate to. There are even plenty of laughable journeys that were taken on purpose.”
More: What Color is Your Jockstrap? Funny Men and Women Write from the Road