Frank Bures

In 2009, Gideon Lewis-Kraus was hanging out in Berlin, with no particular idea of where to go or what to do next, when he got an email from Tom Bissell. Years earlier, the two had met in a bookstore where Lewis-Kraus was working, and they’d stayed in touch. Bissell reminded him that Lewis-Kraus had promised offhandedly to accompany him on the Camino de Santiago, a 500-mile, 1,300-year-old pilgrim’s route across Spain. So the two writers set off together. Their journey on the Camino was replete with drama, blisters and epiphanies, and afterward, Lewis-Kraus wanted more. He started looking up other pilgrimages, like the Shikoku pilgrimage in Japan and the Rosh Hashana pilgrimage in Ukraine, and he went, dutifully toting his never-finished copy of “Middlemarch.” These journeys now make up his new book, A Sense of Direction: Pilgrimage for the Restless and the Hopeful. Frank Bures talked to Lewis-Kraus at his home in Brooklyn, New York.

World Hum: It sounds weird to say that pilgrimages are hot, but it seems that pilgrimages are on the upswing. Is that your sense? And if so, what do you think is the draw for modern travelers?

Gideon Lewis-Kraus: This book started out as a series of emails from the Camino de Santiago, and after the first one, my friend Ralph wrote to me from Berlin and, half-jokingly, said that as long as I could find a way to argue that pilgrimage was the hottest new thing in international youth fashion, I probably had a book on my hands…

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Most travel writers venture into the world and make it home in one piece, but over the years, a few have not made it back. Here’s a look at several whose journeys took unexpected turns. May their memories and words live on a little longer.

Dan Eldon

While primarily a photographer, 22-year-old Dan Eldon also kept strange, beautiful, obsessive journal collages of his travels. In 1993, he and three others were killed by a mob in Somalia. Four years later, his journals were published as a book called “The Journey is the Destination.” The story of that journey will be told in a film starring Daniel Radcliffe as Eldon, scheduled for release in 2011.

Claudia Kirschhoch

In May 2000, a 29-year-old writer and editor named Claudia Kirschhoch was scouting a guidebook for Frommer’s at a Sandals Resort in Negril, Jamaica. One afternoon, she left her hotel room, walked down the beach and was never heard from again. Despite a reward of 1 million Jamaican dollars and a suspect, investigations languished and she was never found. In 2002, she was declared dead.

Robert Byron

In 1941, just four years after writing the second greatest travel book of all time…

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Most of us can’t travel all the time, and sometimes we find ourselves at home, yearning to explore. It’s the feeling of standing before the edge of possibility. It’s the feeling that our life has turned some corner we can’t grasp yet, and that we are going in a slightly different direction.

Fortunately, there are books we can turn to that capture those feelings of motion, disorientation and discovery. Here are works of fiction—both novels and short stories—to take you across the world.

God Lives in St. Petersburg: and Other Stories, by Tom Bissell

These spare yet vibrant stories almost perfectly capture the disorientation and recklessness of life overseas, as well as how it can change us. “Travel scraped him away to reveal not some dulled surface but bright new layers of personality,” Bissell says of one character.

The Sheltering Sky, by Paul Bowles

Bowles’ classic book may have been one of the first to capture the aimlessness of modern life, as his three protagonists travel through North Africa with no particular destination in mind. The book is a beautiful, haunting echo of travel today, with all its melancholy gifts.

Read the rest here.