'See my hand up-tipped, learn the secret of my human heart...' Soaring, freewheeling snapshots of life on the road across America, from the Beat writer who inspired a generation. Penguin Modern: fifty new books celebrating the pioneering spirit of the iconic Penguin Modern Classics series, with each one offering a concentrated hit of its contemporary, international flavour. Here are authors ranging from Kathy Acker to James Baldwin, Truman Capote to Stanislaw Lem and George Orwell to Shirley Jackson; essays radical and inspiring; poems moving and disturbing; stories surreal and fabulous; taking us from the deep South to modern Japan, New York's underground scene to the farthest reaches of outer space.

This book is a major contribution to the study of the encounter between Europeans and non-Europeans in the early modern period and to a neglected aspect of the cultural transformation of Europe throughout the Renaissance. Focusing on European travelers in India and their analysis of Hindu society, politics and religion, it also offers a detailed and systematic study of the variety of travel narratives describing South India from the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries. In addition, the book proposes a novel approach to the study of European attitudes toward non-Europeans.

In 1869, Hayyim Habshush, a Yemeni Jew, accompanied the European orientalist Joseph Halévy on his archaeological tour of Yemen. Twenty years later, Habshush wrote A Vision of Yemen, a memoir of their travels, that provides a vivid account of daily life, religion, and politics. More than a simple travelogue, it is a work of trickster-tales, thick anthropological descriptions, and reflections on Jewish–Muslim relations. At its heart lies the fractious and intimate relationship between the Yemeni coppersmith and the "enlightened" European scholar and the collision between the cultures each represents. The book thus offers a powerful indigenous response to European Orientalism. This edition is the first English translation of Habshush's writings from the original Judeo-Arabic and Hebrew and includes an accessible historical introduction to the work. The translation maintains Habshush's gripping style and rich portrayal of the diverse communities and cultures of Yemen, offering a potent mixture of artful storytelling and cultural criticism, suffused with humor and empathy. Habshush writes about the daily lives of men and women, rich and poor, Jewish and Muslim, during a turbulent period of war and both Ottoman and European imperialist encroachment. With this translation, Alan Verskin recovers the lost voice of a man passionately committed to his land and people.

The ninth and tenth centuries witnessed the establishment of a substantial network of maritime trade across the Indian Ocean, providing the real-life background to the Sinbad tales. An exceptional exemplar of Arabic travel writing, Accounts of China and India is a compilation of reports and anecdotes about the lands and peoples of this diverse territory, from the Somali headlands of Africa to the far eastern shores of China and Korea. Traveling eastward, we discover a vivid human landscape-from Chinese society to Hindu religious practices-as well as a colorful range of natural wilderness-from flying fish to Tibetan musk-deer and Sri Lankan gems. The juxtaposed accounts create a kaleidoscope of a world not unlike our own, a world on the road to globalization. In its ports, we find a priceless cargo of information. Here are the first foreign descriptions of tea and porcelain, a panorama of unusual social practices, cannibal islands, and Indian holy men-a marvelous, mundane world, contained in the compass of a novella. An English-only edition.

From the moment Karen Blixen arrived in Kenya in 1914 to manage a coffee plantation, her heart belonged to Africa. Drawn to the intense colours and ravishing landscapes, Karen Blixen spent her happiest years on the farm and her experiences and friendships with the people around her are vividly recalled in these memoirs. Out of Africa is the story of a remarkable and unconventional woman and of a way of life that has vanished for ever.

Lose yourself in this classic prize-winning memoir of life in 1950s Cyprus on the brink of revolution by the legendary king of travel writing and real-life family member of The Durrells in Corfu. 'Stunning.' Andre Aciman 'Masterly ... Casts a spell.' Jan Morris 'Invades the reader's every sense ... Remarkable.' Victoria Hislop 'These days I am admiring and re-admiring Lawrence Durrell.' Elif Shafak 'Our last great garlicky master of the vanishing Mediterranean.' Richard Holmes 'Exceptional ... Revelatory ... A master.' Observer 'He writes as an artist, as well as a poet . Profoundly beautiful.' New Statesman Cyprus, 1953. As the island fights for independence from British colonial rule, ancient conflicts between Turkish and Greek Cypriots trouble the glittering Mediterranean waters. Into the brewing political storm enters Lawrence Durrell, yearning for the idyllic island lifestyle of his youth in Corfu. He settles into a dilapidated villa, and with his poet's eye for beauty - and passable Greek - vividly captures the moods and atmospheres of island life in a changing world. Whether collecting folklore or wild flowers, describing the brewing revolution or eccentric local characters, Durrell is a magician with words: and the result is not only a classic travel memoir, but an intimate portrait of a community lost forever. WINNER OF THE DUFF COOPER MEMORIAL PRIZE 'Brilliant ... Never for a moment does Durrell lose the poet's touch.' New York Times

For more than 400 years, scholars from an array of disciplines have recognized Theodor de Bry's 1590 edition of Thomas Hariot's A briefe and true report of the new found land of Virginia as a book whose influence shaped contemporary European perceptions of North America, as well as subsequent research on that period for centuries to come.

The book, upon which the present volume is based, is from the collections of the Library at the Mariners' Museum. It is extremely rare, containing hand-colored illustrations from the period, and is one of only three recorded copies with colored plates. This complete facsimile edition presents de Bry's exceptional engravings, based on John White's sixteenth-century watercolors, in their original hand-colored form. The book is available in paperback and as a limited cloth edition of two hundred numbered copies. Both editions are printed by the award-winning Stinehour Press.

As the first volume in de Bry's celebrated Grand Voyages, a series of publications chronicling many of the earliest expeditions to the Americas, this book, which incorporates a 1588 text by Thomas Hariot, was illustrated and published in four languages. It became for many Europeans their first glimpse of the American continent. Accompanying the Latin facsimile is an English text. The first section is modernized from earlier versions of the English, and the second part, which accompanies the plates, is newly translated from the original Latin.

In addition to a valuable introduction, the book includes two illuminating essays. The first, by Karen Ordahl Kupperman, examines the early American settlement and tells how a collaboration between the writer and mathematician Thomas Hariot and the artist John White (later governor of the Roanoke Colony) evolved into a rich study not only of English colonial life but of the Indian culture and the natural resources of the region. The second essay, by Peter Stallybrass, uncovers new information in the much studied plates and presents an intriguing theory about the creation and importance of the engravings.

This facsimile edition will appeal to students and scholars in several fields of study, from American history and ethnography to fine arts and the history of the book, and will provide the reader with the best illustration of the New World as it was first presented to the Old.

Published for the Library at the Mariner's Museum

In 1869, Hayyim Habshush, a Yemeni Jew, accompanied the European orientalist Joseph Halevy on his archaeological tour of Yemen. Twenty years later, Habshush wrote A Vision of Yemen, a memoir of their travels, that provides a vivid account of daily life, religion, and politics. More than a simple travelogue, it is a work of trickster-tales, thick anthropological descriptions, and reflections on Jewish-Muslim relations. At its heart lies the fractious and intimate relationship between the Yemeni coppersmith and the "enlightened" European scholar and the collision between the cultures each represents. The book thus offers a powerful indigenous response to European Orientalism. This edition is the first English translation of Habshush's writings from the original Judeo-Arabic and Hebrew and includes an accessible historical introduction to the work. The translation maintains Habshush's gripping style and rich portrayal of the diverse communities and cultures of Yemen, offering a potent mixture of artful storytelling and cultural criticism, suffused with humor and empathy. Habshush writes about the daily lives of men and women, rich and poor, Jewish and Muslim, during a turbulent period of war and both Ottoman and European imperialist encroachment. With this translation, Alan Verskin recovers the lost voice of a man passionately committed to his land and people.

Artists and writers from the colder climes of northern Europe have long felt the lure of the South of the continent. Goethe was revitalised by his encounters with Mediterranean culture on his journey to Italy. Nietzsche took flight southwards to begin his life anew, while DH Lawrence sought the health-giving southern sun in Sicily and Sardinia. But across the centuries, other outposts of the South have provoked a similar obsession. The South Seas cast a spell over figures such as Herman Melville, Robert Louis Stevenson and Paul Gauguin. The American Deep South and the southermost reaches of Latin America have been celebrated in the works of writers as diverse as John Muir, Jack Kerouac and Jorge Luis Borges. While the Great White South of the Antarctic has provided the backdrop to the darkest imaginings of Coleridge, Poe and Lovecraft. Even London, south of the river, is a place where novelists compete today to stake out a literary territory of their own. Moving between geography and mythology, literature and history, South is the first book to look at all things Southern in one volume. It examines the idea of the South as a symbol of freedom and escape, as well as the depository for many of our deepest unconscious fears and desires. It also charts the history of the South as the chosen location for the utopian visions of the North. From the beaches of Tahiti to the streets of Buenos Aires, from Naples to New Orleans, Merlin Coverley's brilliant and wide-ranging study throws light on the ways in which the idea of the South, in all its forms, has come to exert such a powerful hold on our collective imaginations.

'For most men, as Epicurus has remarked, rest is stagnation and activity madness. Mad or not, the activity that I have been pursuing for the last twenty years takes the form of voyages to remote, mountainous regions.' H.W. 'Bill' Tilman's fourteenth book Ice with Everything describes three more of those voyages, 'the first comparatively humdrum, the second totally disastrous, and the third exceedingly troublesome'. The first voyage describes Tilman's 1971 attempt to reach East Greenland's remote and ice-bound Scoresby Sound. The largest fjord system in the world was named after the father of Whitby whaling captain, William Scoresby, who first charted the coastline in 1822. Scoresby's two-volume Account of the Arctic Regions provided much of the historical inspiration for Tilman's northern voyages and fuelled his fascination with Scoresby Sound and the unclimbed mountains at its head. Tilman's first attempt to reach the fjord had already cost him his first boat, Mischief, in 1968. The following year, a 'polite mutiny' aboard Sea Breeze had forced him to turn back within sight of the entrance, so with a good crew aboard in 1971, it was particularly frustrating for Tilman to find the fjord blocked once more, this time by impenetrable sea ice at the entrance. Refusing to give up, Tilman's obsession with Scoresby Sound continued in 1972 when a series of unfortunate events led to the loss of Sea Breeze, crushed between a rock and an ice floe. Safely back home in Wales, the inevitable search for a new boat began. 'One cannot buy a biggish boat as if buying a piece of soap. The act is almost as irrevocable as marriage and should be given as much thought'. The 1902 pilot cutter Baroque was acquired and after not inconsiderable expense, proved equal to the challenge. Tilman's first troublesome voyage aboard her to West Greenland in 1973 completes this collection.

Every place is a product of the stories we tell about it-stories that do not merely describe but in fact shape geographic, social, and cultural spaces. Lone Star Vistas analyzes travelogues that created the idea of Texas. Focusing on the forty-year period between Mexico's independence from Spain (1821) and the beginning of the US Civil War, Astrid Haas explores accounts by Anglo-American, Mexican, and German authors-members of the region's three major settler populations-who recorded their journeys through Texas. They were missionaries, scientists, journalists, emigrants, emigration agents, and military officers and their spouses. They all contributed to the public image of Texas and to debates about the future of the region during a time of political and social transformation. Drawing on sources and scholarship in English, Spanish, and German, Lone Star Vistas is the first comparative study of transnational travel writing on Texas. Haas illuminates continuities and differences across the global encounter with Texas, while also highlighting how individual writers' particular backgrounds affected their views on nature, white settlement, military engagement, Indigenous resistance, African American slavery, and Christian mission.

'Mirrorlands' is a journey through space and time to the meeting points of Russia and China, the world's largest and most populous countries. Charting an unconventional course southeast through Siberia, Inner Mongolia, the Russian Far East and Manchuria, anthropologist and linguist Ed Pulford sketches a rich series of encounters with people and places unknown not only to outsiders, but also to most residents of the capital cities where his journey begins and ends. What Russia and China have in common goes much deeper than their status as authoritarian post-socialist states or perceived menaces to Western hegemony. Their shared history can only fully be appreciated from an intimately local, borderland perspective. Along remote roads, rivers and railways, in cosmopolitan cities and indigenous villages of the northeast Asian frontiers, Pulford maps the strikingly similar ways in which these two vast empires have ruled their Eurasian domains, before, during and after socialism. With great cultural nuance, 'Mirrorlands' thoughtfully evokes the diverse daily interactions between residents of the Russia-China borderlands, and their resulting visions of 'Europe' and 'Asia'. It is a vivid portrait of centuries of cross-border encounter, mimicry and conflict, key to understanding the global place and identity of two leading world powers.

For many Evangelical Christians, a trip to the Holy Land is an integral part of practicing their faith. Arriving in groups, most of these pilgrims are guided by Jewish Israeli tour guides. For more than three decades, Jackie Feldman-born into an Orthodox Jewish family in New York, now an Israeli citizen, scholar, and licensed guide-has been leading tours, interpreting Biblical landscapes, and fielding questions about religion and current politics. In this book, he draws on pilgrimage and tourism studies, his own experiences, and interviews with other guides, Palestinian drivers and travel agents, and Christian pastors to examine the complex interactions through which guides and tourists "co-produce" the Bible Land. He uncovers the implicit politics of travel brochures and religious souvenirs. Feldman asks what it means when Jewish-Israeli guides get caught up in their own performances or participate in Christian rituals, and reflects on how his interactions with Christian tourists have changed his understanding of himself and his views of religion.

For many Evangelical Christians, a trip to the Holy Land is an integral part of practicing their faith. Arriving in groups, most of these pilgrims are guided by Jewish Israeli tour guides. For more than three decades, Jackie Feldman-born into an Orthodox Jewish family in New York, now an Israeli citizen, scholar, and licensed guide-has been leading tours, interpreting Biblical landscapes, and fielding questions about religion and current politics. In this book, he draws on pilgrimage and tourism studies, his own experiences, and interviews with other guides, Palestinian drivers and travel agents, and Christian pastors to examine the complex interactions through which guides and tourists "co-produce" the Bible Land. He uncovers the implicit politics of travel brochures and religious souvenirs. Feldman asks what it means when Jewish-Israeli guides get caught up in their own performances or participate in Christian rituals, and reflects on how his interactions with Christian tourists have changed his understanding of himself and his views of religion.

John Moore was a Scottish physician who travelled extensively and wrote immensely popular accounts of these, which brought him international fame. Despite this, his travel writings have not been available since 1820. This collection will be the first in almost two centuries to present his 'Travel Writings' to historians and literary scholars.

In the mid-nineteenth century, as new routes opened up, a new generation of travellers embarked on excursions to India, China and Japan. Globetrotters - leisure tourists with a keen interest in experiencing authentic culture - flocked to the East, casting aside preconceptions and gravitating towards what they hoped to be the unchanged landscapes and traditions of Eastern cultures. The relics of their travels - the food they consumed and the souvenirs they brought back - allowed globetrotters to distinguish themselves from common tourists. They proudly returned with accounts that presented a global East, challenging public assumptions about the cultures they had visited and charting a journey of self-transformation through travel.

'To those who went to the War straight from school and survived it, the problem of what to do afterwards was peculiarly difficult.' For H.W. 'Bill' Tilman, the solution lay in Africa: in gold prospecting, mountaineering and a 3,000-mile bicycle ride across the continent. Tilman was one of the greatest adventurers of his time, a pioneering climber and sailor who held exploration above all else. He made first ascents throughout the Himalaya, attempted Mount Everest, and sailed into the Arctic Circle. For Tilman, the goal was always to explore, to see new places, to discover rather than conquer. First published in 1937, Snow on the Equator chronicles Tilman's early adventures; his transition from East African coffee planter to famed mountaineer. After World War I, Tilman left for Africa, where he grew coffee, prospected for gold and met Eric Shipton, the two beginning their famed mountaineering partnership, traversing Mount Kenya and climbing Kilimanjaro and Ruwenzori. Tilman eventually left Africa in typically adventurous style via a 3,000-mile solo bicycle ride across the continent - all recounted here in splendidly funny style. Tilman is one of the greatest of all travel writers. His books are well-informed and keenly observed, concerned with places and people as much as summits and achievements. They are full of humour and anecdotes and are frequently hilarious. He is part of the great British tradition of comic writing and there is nobody else quite like him.

The most comprehensive anthology of writings by visitors to the eternal city ever compiled – witty, profound and endlessly entertaining. Drawing on French, Italian, Spanish, English, German, Scandinavian and American sources, Ronald Ridley has compiled a vivid collage-portrait of Rome through the centuries, illustrated with three hundred images and published in three elegant volumes: The Middles Ages to the Seventeenth Century, The Eighteenth Century and The Nineteenth Century. Presented here is the second volume. How did visitors arrive? Where did they stay? What were their expenses? What did they see of churches, palaces, villas and antiquities? What did they like or dislike of what they saw? What did they think of Rome in all its contemporary facets? What events did they witness? What portraits do they provide of people in Rome at the time of their visit? Excerpts from memoirs by more than two hundred visitors give a myriad fascinating insights and together provide a detailed account of Rome over nearly a millennium.

Libya has not always been the easiest of places for outsiders to visit or to travel in. Yet over the four centuries covered in this book (1550-1911), foreign visitors and travellers have included captives and military recruits; resident European consuls, explorers revealing the mysteries of unknown Africa; archaeologists drawn by the remains of past civilisations; would-be colonisers assessing the agricultural potential; and the leisured tourist of the late nineteenth century seeking the unusual, the quaint and the exotic. All the fifty or so contributors to this book have left written accounts of their Libyan experiences, some confined to Tripoli and its surroundings, others of travel into the remotest corners of the Sahara.

In the summer of 1844, taking a break from novel-writing, the thirty-two-year-old Charles Dickens embarked on a journey to Italy with his wife, his five children and his young sister-in-law. Struck by the scenery and the rapid diorama of monuments and novelties around him, the celebrated author of Oliver Twist and A Christmas Carol captured his experiences and impressions in vivid detail. The result is a travelogue like no other, written by one of the finest writers of all time. Abounding in colour and humour, and interspersed with unforgettable set pieces, such as an eyewitness account of the beheading of a robber in Rome and a hilarious description of a tour guide's ruinous tumble down the slope of Mount Vesuvius, Pictures from Italy is further proof of Charles Dickens's genius and versatility.

James Clark Ross (1800-1862) was an explorer who served in the Royal Navy and made his first Arctic trip in 1818 on an unsuccessful mission to find the North-West Passage between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. On the basis of his polar experience, he was appointed to lead further expeditions, and by 1839 he found himself on the opposite side of the world in the Antarctic, with Joseph Dalton Hooker as his on-board naturalist. This two-volume account of the voyage was published in 1847. Ross' findings led him to the conclusion that there was life on the sea floor to at least 730 metres, which challenged the prevailing 'azoic hypothesis' that nothing could live beneath 550 metres. The work, which includes oceanic and climatic observations, is an important contribution to the development of oceanography and scientific knowledge about the Antarctic.

This volume contains Elizabeth Isabella Spence's Letters from the North Highlands, one of the Romantic era's most successful non-fictional accounts of the Scottish Highlands (1816), a work that, while influenced by Grant's Letters from the Mountains (1806), attempted to move the genre of the Scottish travelogue in new directions.

This volume contains the first volume of Anne Grant's Letters from the Mountains (1806), one of the Romantic era's most successful non-fictional accounts of the Scottish Highlands.