new york times' literary travel section

"the greater part of the vast floor of the desert under us was as black as ink, and apparently smooth and level; but over a mile square of it was ringed and streaked and striped with a thousand branching streams of liquid and gorgeously brilliant fire! It looked like a colossal railroad map of the State of Massachusetts done in chain lightning on a midnight sky. Imagine it — imagine a coal-black sky shivered into a tangled network of angry fire!"

Mark Twain on visiting a lava lake in Hawai'i.

"Man, the imperfect librarian, may be the product of chance or of malevolent demiurgi; the universe, with its elegant endowment of shelves, of enigmatic volumes, of inexhaustible stairways for the traveler and latrines for the seated librarian, can only be the work of a god."

Jorge Luis Borges, inspired by working in a Buenos Aires library.

"New York was an inexhaustible space, a labyrinth of endless steps, and no matter how far he walked, no matter how well he came to know its neighborhoods and streets, it always left him with the feeling of being lost."

Paul Auster on New York City, a literary travel article of which is to be found at this link. (Do not neglect to click on the "Literary Map of Manhattan" to the left of the article, from which the above image is taken. It's very very cool.)

I'd include pictures and quotes from the article on the books that triggered writers' wanderlust, but the article was remarkably boring (not the writer's fault.) When I think about it now, why should I care what books made a bunch of writers want to travel? Most of them didn't actually end up traveling there in any case. The article is one of those things that sounds like a good idea if you don't really think about it, but if you give it a minute's hard think, you'll have to wonder about the relevance. Unless of course, you're asking specifically writers who write about: 1) traveling, 2) people in places furren or exotic to the article's audience, or 3) writers who came to the article's audience's milieu from someplace furren or exotic. Which most of these writers are not. Walter Mosley? Mary Gaitskill? Lorrie Moore? E. L. Doctorow? And especially ... Tom Wolfe? Love some of 'em (and not others), but why wouldn't I go to, like, Linda Watanabe McFerrin, or Michael Ondaatje, or Ruth Ozeki, or Douglas Coupland, or Yann Martel, or Dave Eggers, or, like, Chris Abani or Marjane Satrapi, first? Ya know? Appropriateness, people, let's not be knee-jerk.

The New York Times' Sunday travel section featuring literary landscapes is available on their website now. Read these stories this week before they go behind the firewall. And be sure not to miss the "interactive" part: mini-doc video, interactive map, and slideshows.