Dear Readers,
We are thrilled to announce the release of our beautifully repackaged editions of PEN Award winning journalist Kira Salak’s inspiring travel memoirs, Four Corners: A Journey into Papua New Guinea and The Cruelest Journey: Six Hundred Miles to Timbuktu. In Four Corners, Kira Salak was the first woman ever to traverse Papua New Guinea alone, encountering a slew of interesting characters from cannibals to guerrilla leaders, all while facing incessant harassment from men who simply cannot fathom why a woman would travel without a male companion. In The Cruelest Journey, Kira Salak became the first person in the world to single-handedly kayak the six-hundred miles up the Niger River to Timbuktu—“the golden city of the Middle Ages” and fabled “doorway to the end of the world.” Written with electrifying detail that brings these previously impenetrable landscapes to life, Salak’s memoirs combine the lyricism of a seasoned prose writer with the audacious spirit of a daredevil, perfect for travel aficionados and novices alike.
About the Author
Kira Salak is a decorated journalist, having previously won the PEN Award in Journalism, National Geographic Emerging Explorer Award, the Lowell Thomas Gold Award (several times), the AWP Prague Fellowship Award in Nonfiction, and the Writer’s at Work/Utah Arts Council Fellowship Award in Nonfiction. She is also a prolific writer, having previously published three books, The Cruelest Journey, The White Mary (her first novel), and Four Corners: A Journey into the Heart of Papua New Guinea (a New York Times Notable Travel Book). Her work has been published in both the Best American Travel Writing and Best American Fiction anthologies. She often writes articles for National Geographic, The Washington Post, and The New York Times Magazine. She is the first woman to kayak 600 miles on the Niger River, and the first woman to travel through Papua New Guinea alone. She lives with her husband and daughter, but is currently traveling alone to an undisclosed location for her next work of nonfiction.
By Andrés Neuman
Translated from the Spanish by Jeffrey Lawrence
“The most breathtaking voice in travel writing today may be that of a writer who feels ambivalent about travel itself…. ‘Perhaps the greatest travel book, the most unpredictable of all,’ Andrés Neuman suggests in the closing paragraphs of How to Travel Without Seeing: Dispatches from the New Latin America, ‘would be written by someone who doesn’t go anywhere and simply imagines possible movements. Facing a window that seems like a platform, the author would lift his head and feel the rush of the horizon.’ It’s a line that operates as both valedictory and epigraph…. As How to Travel Without Seeing progresses, it increasingly functions... as a set of vignettes, reflections, shards of memory or observation that add up in the only way such fragments can, as an approximation of consciousness…. This is what it means to travel now.”
—David Ullin, Barnes & Noble Review
Paperback • ISBN: 9781632060556
Publication date: Aug 30, 2016