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The narrow Darién Gap, the only land bridge connecting South and Central America, encompasses a spectacularly hostile jungle, covered in steep mountains, dense rainforests, and flood-prone marshes. Known in Spanish as el infierno verde, or “the green hell,” it is one of the most inhospitable places in the world. Its terrain is too treacherous for roads, yet hundreds of thousands of refuge seekers contend with its horrors every year in the hopes of reaching the United States, still some three thousand miles away. And of the countless who set out for the border, an untold number never arrive.
 
In this book, journalist Belén Fernández travels through the Darién Gap to report on the dehumanizing and deadly stretch of land that has become a mass graveyard for migrants. Fernández’s journey brings her into contact with refuge seekers, people smugglers, law enforcement officials, and many more whose stories bring life to a place overwhelmingly associated with death. Combining history, on-the-ground reporting, travelogue, memoir, and searing politico-economic analysis, she shines light on a largely made-in-the-USA crisis that has come to define our modern era.
 
Engrossing and heartrending, The Darién Gap is a poignant and compassionate indictment of structural inequality and institutionalized inhumanity in a world where the have-nots must risk death for a chance at a better life—or any life at all.

A history of colonial encounters in maritime Southeast Asia, through the lens of an underexplored group of nineteenth-century travelogues.

What did nineteenth-century travellers actually see when they journeyed through the Malay Archipelago—and what did they miss? The travelogues penned by British and Dutch explorers reached a wide readership; they have shaped how we imagine this region with their accounts of island kingdoms, volcanic landscapes, and maritime crossroads. Other voices—Javanese nobles venturing beyond their courts, Eurasian tourists navigating between worlds, French administrators, Scandinavian adventurers, Italian naturalists—remained in the shadows.

The Malay Archipelago through Travellers’ Eyes recovers these overlooked perspectives alongside fresh readings of celebrated figures like James Brooke, the “White Rajah” of Sarawak, and the intrepid Isabella Bird. Here we encounter Purwalelana, whose groundbreaking Javanese travelogue in modern prose abandoned centuries of poetic tradition; Kartini, whose letters became a means of traversing boundaries she could not physically cross; and Dé-Lilah, whose Eurasian heritage gave her writing an unsettling double vision. The naturalist Junghuhn scaling Java’s volcanoes, Raffles burnishing British reputation against Dutch rivals, Italian explorers charting New Guinea's coasts—each constructed not only the lands they described but also themselves.

Travel writing has often claimed to offer transparent windows onto foreign worlds. This collection reveals it as something far more interesting: a literature of encounter where imperial ambition, personal identity, and genuine curiosity intertwine. For anyone captivated by the arts of travel and observation, these essays open new ways of reading a genre we thought we knew.

What happened a few thousand years ago no longer seems quite so far away in time. It is what islands induce in one, a sense of simultaneity, as well as the old penchant a fool might have for occupying several dimensions at once. And the people who inhabited those ancient places seem more and more like ourselves whereas, at times, our contemporaries become increasingly, troublingly, remote.

The islands of the Outer Hebrides have long fostered a culture outside time. Once eroded by the Highland Clearances and persecution of Gaelic, the cornerstones of island culture – stories at the fireside, the singing of psalms, and an intimacy with the past – are now under threat by the trappings of modernity and dominance of the English language. Still, there lingers in most people a desire to tell, and be told, stories: a desire as ancient as oatcakes.

Marius Kociejowski’s story has heroes – the poets of Upper Bayble, perhaps, or Father Colin MacInnes, champion of the Gaelic language – and villains, like the brutal Donald Munro, who delighted in evicting tenant farmers from his master’s land. The Quantum of Happiness distils the elements of joy that exist in this north-westerly corner of Europe and wonders if happiness here is truly measurable: or if it moves at such speed that we don’t even notice its passing.

A unique guide to Florida's frontier history along Indian River.

The Winter Sailor is a historical adventure that details the yearly winter travels of Francis R. Stebbins to Florida's Indian River. Stebbins, a writer from Michigan, visited Florida in March of 1878 and became entranced by its pristine beauty. Subsequently, Stebbins and his traveling companions made annual visits to Indian River—until 1888 when tragedy struck and ended Stebbins' yearly journeys.

Being an observant traveler, Stebbins began a series of descriptive articles for his hometown newspaper that chronicled his journeys to the Indian River area. Stebbins's articles tell of his own personal experiences during his leisurely visits, which included such activities as hunting and fishing, studying the natural surroundings, and excavating Indian mounds. What Stebbins enjoyed most was sailing down the river interviewing townspeople and examining local attractions as he went. His articles also detail the lifestyle of the region, food, fashion, industry, history, environment, and changes that occurred over time. Stebbins's articles not only entertained and informed but also became a travelogue for his readers. He inspired northern travelers to go south and visit Florida, which contributed to the beginnings of large-scale tourism in the region. 

The Winter Sailor combines Stebbins's 49 articles along with three by his companions, to provide an enjoyable, historical guide. Unique among 19th-century travelogues, this fascinating look into Florida's past documents a decade of change to the Indian River wilderness and becomes Stebbins's gift to the present. 
 

The first book of its kind to map writers, walks, and writing within the Suffolk landscape.

This is a book about walking and writing: about walkers who wrote and writers who walk. It is about the circuit that exists between mind and feet, and about landscapes that exist both physically in front of you and in a line of words. And since all this walking and writing and thinking must have somewhere to take place, it is also a book about Suffolk, the author’s birthplace, and how writers have used and responded to its unmistakable magic.

Colliss Harvey travels from west to east, from chalk plain to crag, from velvety farmlands muffled by leaves to deafening shingle and uncompromising sea. She walks in excellent company—her fellow writers range from Daniel Defoe and Robert Louis Stevenson to Patricia Highsmith, P. D. James, Ronald Blythe, and Ruth Rendell. They include the poets George Crabbe and Robert Bloomfield; literary greats Wilkie Collins, George Orwell, and W. G. Sebald, who found a new native land here; and those born in Suffolk, such as M. R. James and Edward Fitzgerald.

The walks can be followed on foot with this book in a backpack, for those moments when walking gives way to reading, or from within the deep comfort of a favorite armchair. A bit of the writer’s notebook, a little of the memoir, and a dash of the love letter, Thoughtlands is a one-of-a-kind literary journey and an unparalleled exploration of the Suffolk landscape.

“Even now,” wrote Christopher Isherwood in his Berlin Diary of 1933, “I can’t altogether believe that any of this has really happened.” Three years later, W. E. B. DuBois described Germany as “silent, nervous, suppressed; it speaks in whispers.” In contrast, a young John F. Kennedy, in the journal he kept on a German tour in 1937, wrote, “The Germans really are too good—it makes people gang against them for protection.”

Drawing on such published and unpublished accounts from writers and public figures visiting Germany, Travels in the Reich creates a chilling composite portrait of the reality of life under Hitler. Written in the moment by writers such as Virginia Woolf, Isak Dinesen, Samuel Beckett, Jean-Paul Sartre, William Shirer, Georges Simenon, and Albert Camus, the essays, letters, and articles gathered here offer fascinating insight into the range of responses to Nazi Germany. While some accounts betray a distressing naivete, overall what is striking is just how clearly many of the travelers understood the true situation—and the terrors to come.

Through the eyes of these visitors, Travels in the Reich offers a new perspective on the quotidian—yet so often horrifying—details of German life under Nazism, in accounts as gripping and well-written as a novel, but bearing all the weight of historical witness.