Investigates the 1996 Venice opera house fire through interviews with local figures, revealing much about the region’s rich cultural history.

Follows the author’s journey from being a self-described “pampered city girl” to a Peace Corps volunteer, wife, and mother living in Ecuador and Uganda.

A young woman’s adventures on a bicycle trip around Spain details the heights of the Pyrenees, local wildlife, and Spanish history.

In the wake of her husband’s death, the author decides to fulfill her long-standing dream of building a new life for herself in Paris, detailing her first year in the City of Lights.

Traces the author’s attempt to travel the world with her friend, a misadventure that culminates in astonishing culture shock on the streets of communist China.

A narrative portrait of the Sierra Madre describes the author’s numerous journeys into its ungoverned regions.

The author recounts how he was dragged by his girlfriend to a tiny region in western France, where he fell in love with the area and made it a second home.

The story of the first European artist to journey to what is now the continental United States with the express purpose of recording its wonders in pencil and paint.

The author recounts her experiences as an English teacher for Kosovo Albanians and how her students formed a book club that brought them together.

An American reporter shares lighthearted observations on her adopted home in London including opinions about Tony Blair’s New Labor government and its interrelation with old-world and modern cultural values.

The author details her travels to Spain, Portugal, France, Britain, Turkey, Greece, Italy, and North Africa, interweaving personal insights with commentary on art, culture, and tradition.

A young Iranian-American journalist returns to Tehran and discovers not only the oppressive and decadent life of her Iranian counterparts, but the pain of searching for a homeland that may not exist.

Having survived a serious illness and an impasse in her career, the author accepted a freelance writing assignment to go to India, where she found herself thunderstruck by the culture and the language.

Follows the author, a gay man, as he uproots his city life to try to live the simple, woodland existence described by Henry David Thoreau in Walden, and tests his spirit, sanity, and relationships to find true happiness.

A personal account by one of the editors of Harvard Review traces her romance and eventual marriage to a Maori man, a relationship through which she learned the history of the New Zealand Maoris and their cultural collisions with the western world.

A witty chronicle of adventures in China, recounting an odyssey from the urban megalopolises of Beijing and Shanghai, to the desolate wastes of the Gobi desert and the distant mountains of Tibet.

A hip, hysterical, beautiful memoir that will have you howling with laughter and questioning what it means to be black and white in America.