In 1790, Xavier de Maistre was 27 years old, and a soldier in the army of the Sardinian Kingdom, which covered swathes of modern-day Northern Italy and Southern France. He was placed under house-arrest in Turin for fighting an illegal duel. It was during the 42 days of his confinement here that he wrote the manuscript that would become Voyage autour de ma chambre. Inspired by the works of Laurence Sterne, with their digressive and colloquial style, de Maistre decided to make the most of his sentence by recording an exploration of the room as a travel journal. de Maistre’s book imbues the tour of his chamber with great mythology and grand scale. As he wanders the few steps that it takes to circumnavigate the space, his mind spins off into the ether. It parodies the travel journals of the eighteenth-century (such as A Voyage Around the World by Louis de Bougainville, 1771), and could be read today as an early take on the modern vogue for “psychogeography” — each tiny thing that he encounters sends de Maistre into rhapsodies, and mundane journeys become magnificent voyages.

STRONGA humorous, soul-searching account of an aging hippie who gives up his hard-won career, family, and home life to bike around the world in search of new experiences At age 45 Robbie Marshall had it all, or so it seemed. He had been married, had two children, and built up a successful advertising agency. So what on earth made him trade his suit for leathers, his office for the saddle of a great motorcycle, and his bulging appointment book for an out-of-date world atlas? The prospect of a new challenge held such overwhelming appeal that he was prepared to risk it all—his hard won career, the trappings of wealth, and the love of a good woman—for life on the road and a lifestyle completely removed from anything he had known before. And so he shook hands with his business partner, kissed his girlfriend goodbye, and rode off into the unknown. Over the course of this double or nothing adventure he came face to face with his own ignorance, enormous danger, and wracking loneliness as well as some of the best that human nature has to offer.

DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "George Edmund Street: Unpublished Notes and Reprinted Papers" by George Edmund Street. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.

"It seems so long ago we were that young and aviation was young too. The world has grown smaller, planes have grown bigger and faster. The globe is enmeshed in a network of flying routes, but private flying has not increased in quite the way we visualized when we decided we would like to learn to fly and when we set out on an adventure to prove to everybody that it was perfectly safe, easy and not too expensive for ordinary folk like us to fly anywhere and everywhere...." Thus begins a vivid account of the remarkable flight of a young English couple, Fred and Marion Goodwin, who in 1936 flew "Wild Oats," a two-seater de Havilland Puss Moth, from London to Karachi and back. At that time, few people flew solo over long distances, but these intrepid aviators crossed from England over Germany and Austria, down through the Balkans, across Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Persia, into India, and returned within the month. Their adventures are captured in an enthralling series of letters home, collected and published here for the first time.