literary journeys: mapping fictional travels across the world of literature

A beautifully illustrated guide to over seventy-five important journeys in world literature, spanning more than thirty countries and twenty-five hundred years

From Homer’s Odyssey, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, and Cervantes’s Don Quixote to Melville’s Moby-Dick, Kerouac’s On the Road, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah, some of the most powerful works of fiction center on a journey. Extending to the ends of the earth and spanning from ancient Greece to today, Literary Journeys is an enthralling book that takes you on a voyage of discovery through some of the most important journeys in literature. In original essays, an international team of literary critics, scholars, and other writers explore exciting, dangerous, tragic, and uplifting journeys in more than seventy-five classic and popular works of fiction from around the world. Chronologically arranged and gorgeously illustrated throughout with paintings, engravings, photographs, and maps in full color, this captivating book will appeal to readers who have travelled widely, who are planning a trip, or who love armchair travel.

• Contributors include Robert McCrum, Susan Shillinglaw, Maya Jaggi, Robert Holden, Suzanne Conklin Akbari, Alan Taylor, Michael Bourne, Sara Mesle--and dozens more.

John McMurtrie is an editor at McSweeney’s Publishing and former books editor at the San Francisco Chronicle. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and Literary Hub.