Paris or The Best American Travel Writing 2008

Paris

Author: Steve Fallon

From the timeless Seine to the city's cosmopolitan street-life and its exceptional art museums, Paris is a feast for the senses. This full-colour guide will ensure you get the most out of the world's most romantic city.

• 24 pages of detailed maps
• discerning coverage of the city's best eateries, from bistrots du quartier to internationally acclaimed restaurants
• hundreds of places to stay, from friendly budget options to the world's most luxurious hotels
• easy-to-follow walks through the city's more elusive neighbourhoods
• where to track down the city's hottest nightlife
• day-trips out of the capital, including Versailles, Chartres and Giverny

New interesting textbook: The Origin of Financial Crises or Dictionary of Real Estate Terms

The Best American Travel Writing 2008

Author: Anthony Bourdain

In his introduction to The Best American Travel Writing 2008, editor Anthony Bourdain writes that the pieces that “spoke the loudest and most powerfully to me were usually evocative of the darker side, those moments fearful, sublime, and absurd; the small epiphanies familiar to the full-time traveler, interspersed by a sense of dislocation—and the strange, unholy need to record the experience.” With this in mind, Bourdain and series editor Jason Wilson have assembled a wide-ranging and wonderfully eclectic collection that delves headlong into those darker moments and subtle realizations, looking to absorb, provoke, and offer a moving record of what it means to travel in the twenty-first century.

Here you will find Seth Stevenson’s extraordinary experience of “Looking for Mammon in the Muslim World” as he makes his way through sweltering and paradoxical Dubai. Exotic tastes and larger-than-life personalities abound as Bill Buford accompanies the chocolate maker Frederick Schilling to the rain forests of Brazil. And on the other side of the world, Calvin Trillin trolls Singapore for the ultimate street food, while Kristin Ohlson delves into the harrowing challenges faced by proprietors of restaurants in Kabul, Afghanistan.

The twenty-five pieces in this collection have their fair share of the absurd as well. David Sedaris explains the hilarious highs (sundaes) and woeful lows (sobbing with your seatmate) of flying Business Elite. Gary Shteyngart goes “To Russia for Love” during St. Petersburg’s vodka-soaked wedding season. And Emily Maloney gets up close and personal with her fellow travelers—and their massagedevices—in a South American hostel.

Culled from an amazing variety of publications, “the writing in this volume is so vibrantly good, you’ll feel like you’ve armchair-traveled around the world” (Chicago Sun Times).