Mark Del Savio is deployed to Vietnam ten days after marrying the beautiful but capricious Serena. The forced separation immediately after the nuptials puts an immediate strain on their relationship. Serena miscarries their child early on in Mark’s tour, which begins a downward spiral in their marriage. Mark gets run over by a US Army truck during the Tet Offensive of 1968 while working in the Long Binh Ammunition Depot, has a near-death experience, and begins to cope with life in a hedonistic fashion. This point of demarcation has him living life on the edge as if each day were his last and as one endless adventure. The war itself is simply a backdrop to this story that sometimes interrupts with rocket attacks, massive explosions, and the death of fellow soldiers. When he faces the reality of returning home, it turns out to be his biggest challenge of all.

This book discusses the epistemic foundation of the heuristic construct ‘vagabond’ and the convergence between the politics of itinerancy and that of dissent in the context of South Asia. It describes the fraught relationship between ‘native’ itinerant practices and techniques of governmentality which have furnished different categorizations and taxonomies of mobility. The book demonstrates the historical seismic breaks – from the Orientalist to the post-Orientalist, from the premodern to the modern, and from the colonial to the post-colonial – in the representation of the vagabond in the juridico-political imagination, in historiography and cultural articulation. For instance, the drunk European sailor, the quasi-religious mendicant, and the helpless famine refugee have all been referred to as ‘vagabonds’ in the colonial archive. This book examines the histories and conditions behind these conceptual overlaps, as well as the uncanny associations among categories that uneasily coexist and mirror each other as subsets of a vast range of phenomena, which may loosely be called ‘vagabond(age)’. This volume will be of interest to students and researchers of literature, cultural studies, colonial and post-colonial studies, history, migration studies, sociology, and South Asia studies.

The author and his new German wife packed their backpacks and, with no money, on a beautiful summer day, set out on the road with no goal or purpose and with little knowledge of what lie ahead. Together they blazed a trail from Europe to India that a few years later would become known as The Hippie Trail. Hitch-hiking from Frankfurt, through Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Rangoon, Bangkok, Malaysia, Singapore, Saigon, Hong Kong, and Tokyo, they led a life filled with meeting incredible people, experiencing strange cultures, humorous incidents, dangerous adventures, and desperate circumstances, aimlessly wandering on the road and in the streets of Europe and Asia until it all led back to that search for meaning, leading to a desperate climax in the deserts of Rajasthan.

A century after the Martian war of independence, a group of kids are sent to Earth as delegates from Mars, but when they return home, they are caught between the two worlds, unable to reconcile the beauty and culture of Mars with their experiences on Earth in this “thoughtful debut” (Kirkus Reviews) from Hugo Award–winning author Hao Jingfang. This “masterful narrative” (Booklist, starred review) is set on Earth in the wake of a second civil war…not between two factions in one nation, but two factions in one solar system: Mars and Earth. In an attempt to repair increasing tensions, the colonies of Mars send a group of young people to live on Earth to help reconcile humanity. But the group finds itself with no real home, no friends, and fractured allegiances as they struggle to find a sense of community and identity trapped between two worlds.

“Thought-provoking, encouraging, and inspiring” (Gretchen Rubin) reflections on the power of travel to transform our daily lives—from the iconoclastic travel writer, scholar, and author of Vagabonding For readers who dream of travel, yearn to get back out on the road, or want to enrich a journey they’re currently on, The Vagabond’s Way explores and celebrates the life-altering essence of travel all year long. Each day of the year features a meditation on an aspect of the journey, anchored by words of wisdom from a variety of thinkers—from Stoic philosopher Seneca and poet Maya Angelou to Trappist monk Thomas Merton and Grover from Sesame Street. Iconoclastic travel writer and scholar Rolf Potts embraces the ragged-edged, harder-to-quantify aspects of travel that inevitably change travelers’ lives for the better in unexpected ways. The book’s various sections mirror the phases of a trip, including • dreaming and planning the journey: “All life-affecting journeys—and the unexpected wonders they promise—become real the moment you decide they will happen.” • embracing the rhythms of the journey: “The most poignant experiences on the road occur in those quiet moments when we recognize beauty in the ordinary.” • finding richer travel experiences: “Developing an instinct to venture beyond the obvious on the road allows you to see places as mysteries to be investigated.” • expanding your comfort zone: “No moment of instant gratification can compare to savoring an experience that has been earned by enduring the adversity that comes with it.” The Vagabond’s Way encourages you to sustain the mindset of a journey, even when you aren’t able to travel, and affirms that travel is as much a way of being as it is an act of movement.

In 1986, Mayumi left Japan with a bicycle to flee from constrains of life as a Japanese girl. Without a plan nor travelling experiences, she kept pedalling around the globe – during the final epoch of the Cold War – for about 35,000 kilometres, facing various kinds of difficulties and taking advantage of people’s goodwill. This is the travel story of about the first half of her drifting passage, from Japan up to the last stop in South America – Brazil – in which there are clues to interpret the enigma of Japan and Japanese as well as a cross section of Latin America in the Cold War era.