Essayist Catharine Savage Brosman explores the relationship of human beings to their environment, traveling from American deserts to dense European urban settings. Whether sipping wine in a Parisian café, partying with the jet set in Aspen, or contemplating the arid desert West that she loves, Brosman inhabits these settings, and many others, with a sense of adventure and discovery. To read these essays is to enjoy the company of a lively, thoughtful, original mind. Brosman’s "higher ground" is that place we all seek, where we can find and express our own best selves.

Over the course of his life, Frank Waters amassed a body of work that has few equals in the literature of the American West. Because his was a writing that touched every facet of the Western experience, his voice still echoes throughout that region’s literary world.

Swallow Press is especially proud to present this generous sampling of Frank Waters’s writings. A Frank Waters Reader encompasses the full range of his work and draws from both his nonfiction and his many novels. It stands as a testament to his singular achievement and proof of the talent that established him as the foremost writer in the Southwest.

This collection spanning forty years of writing provides an excellent introduction for the uninitiated as well as a retrospective for those already familiar with this giant talent. His gift for achieving a delicate balance among the many contrary forces at work in the land and the people who inhabit it is as true and enduring as the region that inspired him.

Over the course of his life, Frank Waters amassed a body of work that has few equals in the literature of the American West. Because his was a writing that touched every facet of the Western experience, his voice still echoes throughout that region’s literary world.

Swallow Press is especially proud to present this generous sampling of Frank Waters’s writings. A Frank Waters Reader encompasses the full range of his work and draws from both his nonfiction and his many novels. It stands as a testament to his singular achievement and proof of the talent that established him as the foremost writer in the Southwest.

This collection spanning forty years of writing provides an excellent introduction for the uninitiated as well as a retrospective for those already familiar with this giant talent. His gift for achieving a delicate balance among the many contrary forces at work in the land and the people who inhabit it is as true and enduring as the region that inspired him.

The Victorian era was the high point of literary tourism. Writers such as Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Sir Walter Scott became celebrities, and readers trekked far and wide for a glimpse of the places where their heroes wrote and thought, walked and talked. Even Shakespeare was roped in, as Victorian entrepreneurs transformed quiet Stratford-upon-Avon into a combination shrine and tourist trap.

Stratford continues to lure the tourists today, as do many other sites of literary pilgrimage throughout Britain. And our modern age could have no better guide to such places than Simon Goldhill. In Freud's Couch, Scott’s Buttocks, Brontë's Grave, Goldhill makes a pilgrimage to Sir Walter Scott's baronial mansion, Wordsworth's cottage in the Lake District, the Bront ë parsonage, Shakespeare's birthplace, and Freud's office in Hampstead. Traveling, as much as possible, by methods available to Victorians—and gamely negotiating distractions ranging from broken bicycles to a flock of giggling Japanese schoolgirls—he tries to discern what our forebears were looking for at these sites, as well as what they have to say to the modern mind. What does it matter that Emily Brontë’s hidden passions burned in this specific room? What does it mean, especially now that his fame has faded, that Scott self-consciously built an extravagant castle suitable for Ivanhoe—and star-struck tourists visited it while he was still living there? Or that Freud's meticulous recreation of his Vienna office is now a meticulously preserved museum of itself? Or that Shakespeare’s birthplace features student actors declaiming snippets of his plays . . . in the garden of a house where he almost certainly never wrote a single line?

Goldhill brings to these inquiries his trademark wry humor and a lifetime's engagement with literature. The result is a travel book like no other, a reminder that even today, the writing life still has the power to inspire.

Because prior studies of American women’s travel writing have focused exclusively on middle-class and wealthy travelers, it has been difficult to assess the genre and its participants in a holistic fashion. One of the very few surviving working-class travel diaries, Lorenza Stevens Berbineau’s account provides readers with a unique perspective of a domestic servant in the wealthy Lowell family in Boston. Staying in luxurious hotels and caring for her young charge Eddie during her six-month grand tour, Berbineau wrote detailed and insightful entries about the people and places she saw.

Contributing to the traditions of women’s, diary, and travel literature from the perspective of a domestic servant, Berbineau's narrative reveals an arresting and intimate outlook on both her own life and the activities, places, and people she encounters. For example, she carefully records Europeans’ religious practices, working people and their behavior, and each region’s aesthetic qualities. Clearly writing in haste and with a pleasing freedom from the constraints of orthographic and stylistic convention, Berbineau offers a distinctive voice and a discerning perspective. Alert to nuances of social class, her narrative is as appealing and informative to today's readers as it no doubt was to her fellow domestics in the Lowell household.

Unobtrusively edited to retain as much as possible the individuality and texture of the author’s original manuscript, From Beacon Hill to the Crystal Palace offers readers brief framing summaries, informative endnotes, and a valuable introduction that analyzes Berbineau’s narrative in relation to gender and class issues and compares it to the published travel writing of her famous contemporary, Harriet Beecher Stowe.

Winner of the AAG’s John Brinckerhoff Jackson Prize
Winner of the Great Lakes American Studies Association/Ohio University Press Book Award

Throughout the nineteenth century, the southern shores of Lake Superior held great promise for developers imagining the next great metropolis. These new territories were seen as expanses to be filled, first with romantic visions, then with scientific images, and later with vistas designed to entice settlement and economic development. The Future City on the Inland Sea describes the attempts of explorers under government, commercial, or scientific sponsorship to project their imaginative visions on a region where the future did not happen as planned.

Author Eric D. Olmanson takes a fresh look at the settlements in the vicinity of Chequamegon Bay and the Apostle Islands by analyzing the texts and images left by the missionaries, geologists, ordinance surveyors, newspaper editors, and boosters. The Future City on the Inland Sea shows how new visions of the place absorbed and replaced the old ones, eventually producing what might be called for the first time “a region.”

More than a regional geography, The Future City on the Inland Sea is an appraisal of these early efforts to meld geographies of physical nature with those of human ideals, a demonstration of how thoroughly and paradoxically those two realms are entangled.