This talented author has again accomplished the impossible by bringing her colorful characters to life in a very entertaining way as only she can do.Read aboutthe young boy who discovered a beer box airplane made a wreckage of his plans to fight the war..the older couple who loved squirrel meat; she couldnt see, he couldnt hear so they hunted together quite successfully..the old soldier who thought bathing made him smell like a sissy.. the storekeeper who made and sold pickled dog..the old...

Join George and Mary Ayers in the late seventies when South America was a little rougher and a little wilder, for an incredible journey through Peru, the Amazon, Chile, and Bolivia. Fusing together details scoured from their personal journals, photos, and letters home, Buzzards and Bananas captures the essence of everything from the mundane and sometimes humorous moments of day-to-day travel to the emotional strains on relationships; from the excitement of a midnight Federales raid on their A...

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • “One of contemporary literature’s most revered essayists revives her raw records from a 1970s road trip across the American southwest ... her acute observations of the country’s culture and history feel particularly resonant today.” —Harper’s BazaarJoan Didion, the bestselling, award-winning author of The Year of Magical Thinking and Let Me Tell You What I Mean, has always kept notebooks—of overheard dialogue, interv...

**THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING TRAVEL MEMOIRWhat happens when an unadventurous adventure writer tries to re-create the original expedition to Machu Picchu?**In 1911, Hiram Bingham III climbed into the Andes Mountains of Peru and “discovered” Machu Picchu. While history has recast Bingham as a villain who stole both priceless artifacts and credit for finding the great archeological site, Mark Adams set out to retrace the explorer’s perilous path in search of the t...

“Lake Wobegon Days is about the way our beliefs, desires and fears tail off into abstractions--and get renewed from time to time. . . this book, unfolding Mr. Keillor's full design, is a genuine work of American history.” -The New York Times“A comic anatomy of what is small and ordinary and therefore potentially profound and universal in American life…Keillor’s strength as a writer is to make the ordinary extraordinary.” -Chicago Tribune

From the Canadian Rockies to the Panamanian jungle, Motorcycle Therapy rumbles with comic adventure as two men, fleeing failed relationships, test the limits of their motorcycles and their friendship. Join the horn-honking, signal-flashing, wheelie-popping pair as they endure painful bee stings, painful snakebites and (when they talk to girls) painful humiliation. Even if you hate reading, motorcycles and travel books, you'll love reading this motorcycle travel book.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The extraordinary true story of a journey into the deepest recesses of the Amazon to track one of the planet's last uncontacted indigenous tribes.Even today there remain tribes in the far reaches of the Amazon rainforest that have avoided contact with modern civilization. Deliberately hiding from the outside world, they are the last survivors of an ancient culture that predates the arrival of Columbus in the New World. In this g...

The story of the mill people of Jacksonville, Alabama. The mill was here before the automobile, before the flying machine, and they served it even as it filled their lungs with lint and shortened their lives. In return, it let them live in stiff-necked dignity in the hills of their fathers. So, when death did come, no one had to ship their bodies home on a train. This is a mill story; not of bricks, steel, and cotton, but of the people who suffered it to live.

In March 1986, while living in Brooklyn, Chris Bohjalian and his wife were cab-napped on a Saturday night and taken on a forty-five-minute joy ride in which the driver ignored all traffic lights and stop signs. Around midnight he deposited the young couple on a near-deserted street, where police officers were about to storm a crack house. Bohjalian and his wife were told to hit the ground for their own protection. While lying on the pavement, Bohjalian's wife suggested that perhaps it was ...

Remember when you were a kid and you got your first bicycle? After a few weeks of mastering the dynamics of balancing, steering, and pedaling, all at the same time hopefully, your father released his protective, steadying grip on the seat and you went wobbling off on your own. It was probably your very first taste of independence and freedom and you knew you liked that feeling very much. Few things in life have ever compared to that first solo ride.Almost 40 years after my first so...

Collected here in Escape Velocity, edited by Jay Jennings, is his "miscellany" †“†“ journalism, short fiction, memoir, and even the play Delray's New Moon, published for the first time in this volume.  Portis covers topics as varied as the civil rights movement, road tripping in Baja, and Elvis' s visits to his aging mother for publications such as the New York Herald Tribune and Saturday Evening Post.  Fans of Portis’s droll Southern humor and quirky characters will be thrilled at this ...

In the 60's, Carlos Caggiani traveled to 26 countries on an old motorcycle with hardly a penny to his name. He suffered famine, intense weather, was chased by the FBI, was shot at in Bolivia, and even survived a serious accident. The experiences in this book demonstrate a human being's tenacity and triumph in the face of adversity.