Why a Booktrail?
2000s: a collection of interlacing tales of men and women as they face the mysteries and magic of the world.
A Registry of My Passage upon the Earth
What you need to know before your trail
On a fated flight, a balloonist makes a discovery that changes her life forever. A telegraph operator finds an unexpected companion in the middle of the Amazon. A doctor is beset by seizures, in which he is possessed by a second, perhaps better, version of himself. And in Regency London, a bare-knuckle fighter prepares to face his most fearsome opponent, while a young mother seeks a miraculous cure for her ailing son.
At times funny and irreverent, always moving, these stories cap a fifteen-year project that has won both a National Magazine Award and Pushcart Prize. From the Nile’s depths to the highest reaches of the atmosphere, from volcano-wracked islands to an asylum on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro, these are lives of ecstasy and epiphany.
Travel Guide
Around the world in short stories with Daniel Mason
From the Nile’s depths to the highest reaches of the atmosphere, from volcano-racked islands to an asylum on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro, these are tales of ecstasy, epiphany, and what the New York Times Magazine called the “struggle for survival . . . hand to hand, word to word,” by “one of the finest prose stylists in American fiction.”
London and the Industrial Revolution
“the city sodden with Christmas toddy, hearth fires lolling the ash of sea coal into the Thames fog, the sugar mills reburning.” Here’s some of his uncle’s language abilities described: “His vulgar Russian of the gulag nursery, his market Uzbek, his Ukrainian, his singsong French with pungent Belleville curses…”
The Amazon
The ecstasy of Alfred Russel Wallace, is about the life of a ‘bug-collector’ who wanders the world classifying insects. To Darwin’s chagrin, he puts forward evolutionary theory before the publication of The Origin of Species.
BookTrail Boarding Pass: A Registry of My Passage Upon the Earth
Destination/location: South America, worldwide Author/guide: Daniel Mason Departure Time: 2000s
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