From our very youngest age, books are windows to the world. Perhaps it started for us in a small room with a fireplace, staring out at the beautiful moon...or hopping fences to explore a garden (and enjoy a meal). Then came funky Suessian lands, perhaps a wardrobe, flying to a pirate-infested island, or leaving the coziest home ever to go on an adventure. In our family, the entire Odyssey was narrated to our daughter while swimming every day in our lake (started when she was 4, this lasted years, seemingly as long as his journey. But I digress). 

Stories about travel have always taken us places, explored difference and commonalities, taught us much, and shown us the world. Once we are grown, they are no less magical. Often, there is TOO much choice—and not enough in-depth guidance to truly explore the best of literary travels. 

Enter Literary Journeys: Mapping Fictional Travels Across the World of Literature, edited by John McMurtrie and published by Princeton University Press.  

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.

This book is an UTTER joy, complete page turner, and a lifelong reading guide to journeys that will enrich our lives. 

The essays in the book are categorized by era into Quests & Explorations (ca. 725-675 BCE-1897), The Age of Travel (1899-1953), Postmodern Movements (1955-1998), and Contemporary Crossings (2000-2021). Each of the 75 essays is illustrated by the cover, author photo, and accompanying art/photography. These bring the beautifully written, educational, and deep background provided by the contributors to life. 

I am not one to fold over page corners. You can tell this by the amount of post-it flags I have on these pages (sorted into reading priority by color), as well as the enormous stack of books I've pulled from my bookshelves and the long list of books to hold at the library as time permits. Literary Journeys is SUCH a treasure. 

Highly, highly recommended!

John McMurtrie is an independent book editor. He is senior editor of the literary journal Zyzzyva, a contributing editor of the quarterly literary travel magazine Stranger’s Guide, and an editor for McSweeney’s Publishing. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and Literary Hub. He served as the books editor of the San Francisco Chronicle for a decade. A native of Boston, he lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

We were lucky enough to chat with McMurtrie, and ask him about the collection of journeys in the book, favorite books, backstories, and global literature. Here's what he had to say...

One of the many things I love about this book is the broad meaning of travel. What are the ties that bind these stories about journeys together?
I like that this collection features so many different sorts of journeys. There are characters who are returning home, there are those fleeing home, some are exploring their immediate surroundings. Usually the motivation is not unlike the one spoken by Gus in Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove: “Life’s a short affair. Why spend it here?” 

The world is full of excellent books about journeys, of course. How did you winnow it down to these?
For starters, my fellow editors and I wanted the book to showcase works of fiction from throughout the centuries. So we start with The Odyssey, in antiquity, and travel through time to the present—wrapping up with Amor Towles’ novel The Lincoln Highway, published in 2021. We also wanted the book to be truly global, to have stories that take place around the world and are written in languages other than English. Reading the book, you’ll notice, too, that characters travel in a lot of different ways. By car, of course, but also on foot, by train, and by bicycle. A range of modes of transport was important. There are many famous authors in the book—Chaucer and Melville and Nabokov, among them—but there are also authors who’ll be unknown, until now, to many readers, including Kim Thuy and Tommy Wieringa and Arikawa Hiro. One last thing: these stories aren’t simply yarns of people going off on adventures. There’s Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days, sure, but there’s also plenty of dark material, everything from Paul Bowles’s The Sheltering Sky to Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Not all journeys have happy endings.      

It's hard for me to pick a favorite essay in this book. Even if I've not yet read a particular book, each writer compelled me to continually place library holds. What are your favorite books about journeys (whether they are in this compendium or not)?
I would put W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn near the top of my list. Sebald had a wonderfully digressive style, and I think he brilliantly captured a true sense of what it’s like to journey by foot, having your mind wander from subject to subject, dipping in and out of stories that interested him—and taking in what he saw in its historical context. Don Quixote remains a timeless pleasure—I’m a sucker for anything that approaches life through a comic or absurdist lens. And Rachel Joyce’s The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry is a heartwarming story without being syrupy sweet.      

Do you have any backstories from editing this book that readers would be delighted to discover?
At the time I was working on it, I taught myself to paddle board in San Francisco Bay. It was the height of the pandemic, I wasn’t traveling, but I ventured out on my own into the water. No one else was around me for miles, and it was very calming. Occasionally a seal would hang out with me. I’d look out to the Pacific and think about how the land due west of the Golden Gate Bridge was Japan. Surely there were people in Japan looking back in my direction.

I was elated to see global as well as Western literature discussed in this book. What do you hope that readers (whether they are already or future global travelers) take away in terms of intercultural understanding? 
As I write in the introduction, the world is getting smaller, but it’s also getting more divided. Bad things can happen to people when they travel, but more often than not the experience opens our minds. That’s what I hope this book does. That, and entertain you.

Find the book online at https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691266398/literary-journeys

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