NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK • An exhilarating, often deliciously funny and "beautifully written voyage of discovery" (Chicago Tribune) that is at once a travelogue, a social history, and a love letter to America. • From the bestselling, award-winning author of Bad Land In 1782 an immigrant with the high-toned name J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur—"Heartbreak" in English—wrote a pioneering account of one European's transformation into an American. Some two hundred years later Jonathan Raban, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, arrived in Crèvecoeur's wake to see how America has paid off for succeeding generations of newcomers. In the course of Hunting Mr. Heartbreak, Raban passes for homeless in New York and tries to pass for a good ol' boy in Alabama (which entails "renting" an elderly black lab). He sees the Protestant work ethic perfected by Korean immigrants in Seattle—one of whom celebrates her new home as "So big! So green! So wide-wide-wide!"—and repudiated by the lowlife of Key West. And on every page of this peerlessly observant work, Raban makes us experience America with wonder, humor, and an unblinking eye for its contradictions.

A story of self-discovery set against a journey across America. It follows the author as he moves from the social battlefield of Manhattan to rural Alabama, continually re-inventing his own character as he travels. By the author of Old Glory and Arabia through a Looking Glass .

From the national bestselling, National Book Critics Circle Award-winning author of Bad Land comes “a lively, intensely personal recounting of a voyage into a gifted writer's country and self” (The New York Times Book Review). Put Jonathan Raban on a boat and the results will be fascinating, and never more so than when he’s sailing around the serpentine, 2,000-mile coast of his native England. In this acutely perceived and beautifully written book, the bestselling author of Bad Land turns that voyage–which coincided with the Falklands war of 1982-into an occasion for meditations on his country, his childhood, and the elusive notion of home. Whether he’s chatting with bored tax exiles on the Isle of Man, wrestling down a mainsail during a titanic gale, or crashing a Scottish house party where the kilted guests turn out to be Americans, Raban is alert to the slightest nuance of meaning. One can read Coasting for his precise naturalistic descriptions or his mordant comments on the new England, where the principal industry seems to be the marketing of Englishness. But one always reads it with pleasure.

Seattle, with its spectacular natural beauty and rough frontier history, has inspired writers from its earliest days. This anthology spans seven decades and includes fiction, memoirs, histories, and journalism that define the city or use it as a setting, imparting the flavor of the city through a literary prism. Reading Seattle features classics by Horace R. Cayton, Richard Hugo, Betty MacDonald, Mary McCarthy, Murray Morgan, and John Okada as well as more recent works by Sherman Alexie, Lynda Barry, David Guterson, J. A. Jance, Jonathan Raban, and others. It includes cutting-edge work by emerging talents and reintroduces works by important Seattle writers who may have been overlooked in recent years. The writers featured in this volume explore a variety of neighborhoods and districts within the city, delineating urban spaces and painting memorable portraits of characters both historical and fictional.

The bestselling, award-winning author of Bad Land takes us along the Inside Passage, 1,000 miles of often treacherous water, which he navigates solo in a 35-foot sailboat, offering captivating discourses on art, philosophy, and navigation and an unsparing narrative of personal loss. "A work of great beauty and inexhaustible fervor." —The Washington Post Book World With the same rigorous observation (natural and social), invigorating stylishness, and encyclopedic learning that he brought to his National Book Award-winning Bad Land, Jonathan Raban conducts readers along the Inside Passage from Seattle to Juneau. But Passage to Juneau also traverses a gulf of centuries and cultures: the immeasurable divide between the Northwest's Indians and its first European explorers—between its embattled fishermen and loggers and its pampered new class.

Containing more than 600 entries, this valuable resource presents all aspects of travel writing. There are entries on places and routes (Afghanistan, Black Sea, Egypt, Gobi Desert, Hawaii, Himalayas, Italy, Northwest Passage, Samarkand, Silk Route, Timbuktu), writers (Isabella Bird, Ibn Battuta, Bruce Chatwin, Gustave Flaubert, Mary Kingsley, Walter Ralegh, Wilfrid Thesiger), methods of transport and types of journey (balloon, camel, grand tour, hunting and big game expeditions, pilgrimage, space travel and exploration), genres (buccaneer narratives, guidebooks, New World chronicles, postcards), companies and societies (East India Company, Royal Geographical Society, Society of Dilettanti), and issues and themes (censorship, exile, orientalism, and tourism). For a full list of entries and contributors, a generous selection of sample entries, and more, visit the Literature of Travel and Exploration: An Encyclopedia website.