Writing Travel

Jon and Janet's European adventure is shattered by world events- not the trip itself, but the telling of it. In a harsh post-9/11 world, the once glib travel writer finds he must take the long road to truth telling, and to rediscovering a woman he thought he knew.

In AU JAPON (1904), de Guerville recounts with mostly comical gaze-and perhaps a touch of imagination-his experiences in the Far East during the years 1892 and 1894. As the author himself confesses, "each of us sees things in our own way." After a century, that of Monsieur de Guerville is worth rediscovering. In addition to translating the original French, DANIEL C. KANE provides a thorough introduction, a glossary of key figures, a chronology of de Guerville's publications, and an index.

Nellie Arnott's Writing on Angola, 1905-1913 recovers and interprets the public texts of a teacher serving at a mission station sponsored by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions in Portuguese West Africa. Along with a collection of her magazine narratives, mission reports, and correspondence, Nellie Arnott's Writing on Angola offers a critical analysis of Arnott's writing about her experiences in Africa, including interactions with local Umbundu Christians, and about her journey home to the U.S., when she spent time promoting the mission movement before marrying and settling in California.

A work of creative nonfiction, VIENNA VOICES: A TRAVELER LIST E01 General/trade TO THE CITY OF DREAMS offers a nuanced portrait of the enigmatic "City of Dreams," whose intellectual and artistic culture reached its height at the end of the nineteenth century, only to be eclipsed in the twentieth by the collapse of the Habsburg empire and the rise of National Socialism.

A Lady Trader in the Transvaal presents the South African adventures of Sarah Heckford, a once famous but now forgotten Anglo-Irish gentlewoman. After treking to the Transvaal in 1878, this intrepid woman served as governess, doctor, builder, nurse, and farmer. When her farm failed, she broke through the barriers of gender and class to make her fortune as a smous or peddler -trading with the Africans and Afrikaners of the remote bush-veldt. Caught up in the Anglo-Boer War of 1879—1880, she survived the hundred-day siege of Pretoria only to find the British dishonored and herself financially ruined.