The travel experience filled with personal trauma; the pilgrimage through a war-torn place; the journey with those suffering: these represent the darker sides of travel. What is their allure and how are they represented? This volume takes an ethnographic and interdisciplinary approach to explore the writings and texts of dark journeys and travels. In traveling over the dead, amongst the dying, and alongside the suffering, the authors give us a tour of humanity’s violence and misery. And yet, from this dark side, there comes great beauty and poignancy in the characterization of plight; creativity in the comic, graphic, and graffiti sketches and comments on life; and the sense of profound and spiritual journeys being undertaken, recorded, and memorialized.

2021 Independent Publisher Book Awards, Gold Medal Winner 2021 National Indie Excellent Awards Finalist 2020 Bronze Award for Travel Book or Guide from the North American Travel Journalists Association 2020 Bronze Winner for Travel in the Foreword INDIES Both a memoir in travel essays and an anti-guidebook, Bad Tourist takes us across four continents to fifteen countries, showing us what not to do when traveling. A woman learning to claim her own desires and adventures, Suzanne Roberts encounters lightning and landslides, sharks and piranha-infested waters, a nightclub drugging, burning bodies, and brief affairs as she searches for the love of her life and finally herself. Throughout her travels Roberts tries hard not to be a bad tourist, but owing to her cultural blind spots, things don’t always go as planned. Fearlessly confessional, shamelessly funny, and wholly unapologetic, Roberts offers a refreshingly honest account of the joys and absurdities of confronting new landscapes and cultures, as well as new versions of herself. Raw, bawdy, and self-effacing, Bad Tourist is a journey packed with delights and surprises—both of the greater world and of the mysterious workings of the heart.

From Bangkok to Bogotá, a hilarious behind-the-brochures tour of picture-perfect locales, dangerous destinations, and overrated hellholes from a guy who knows the truth about travel Travel writer, editor, and photographer Chuck Thompson has spent more than a decade traipsing through thirty-five (and counting) countries across the globe, and he's had enough. Enough of the half-truths demanded by magazine editors, enough of the endlessly recycled clichés regarded as good travel writing, and enough of the ugly secrets fiercely guarded by the travel industry. But mostly, he's had enough of returning home from assignments and leaving the most interesting stories and the most provocative insights on the editing-room floor. From getting swindled in Thailand to running afoul of customs inspectors in Belarus, from defusing hostile Swedish rockers backstage in Germany to a closed-door meeting with travel execs telling him why he's about to be fired once again, Thompson's no-holds-barred style is refreshing, invigorating, and all those other adjectives travel writers use to describe spa vacations where the main attraction is a daily colonic. Smile When You're Lying takes readers on an irresistible series of adventures in Europe, Asia, the Caribbean, Latin America, and beyond; details the effects of globalization on the casual traveler and ponders the future of travel as we know it; and offers up a treasure trove of travel-industry secrets collected throughout a decidedly speckled career.

The Darker Side of Travel is a contemporary and comprehensive analysis of dark tourism. Drawing on existing literature, numerous examples and introducing new conceptual perspectives, it develops a theoretically informed foundation for examining the demand for and supply of dark tourism experiences. It also explores issues relevant to the development, management and interpretation of visitor sites and attractions associated with death, disaster and suffering.

"These timely reconsiderations of European Travel writing from the 1930s reassert the oppositional primacy of subjective translations and disavow hermetic notions that travel should or even can be divorced from socio-political or cultural contexts." - Journeys "Cultural Encounters offers a rich, varied and yet impressively coherent collection of essays on the meanings and practices of travel writing in 1930s Europe. Carefully building on theoretical interest in travel writing of recent years, the essays follow written journeys to Graham Greene's Liberia and Lorca's Cuba, to Fascist Italy's Greece and France's Indochina, and many more. Throughout, texts and authors are shown to be alive with hybrid constructions of self and of ideological, national and colonial identity. What is more, the book provides compelling reasons for seeing 1930s travel writing as being of particular fascination, lying on a cusp between the Depression, totalitarianism, colonialism and modernism, and the seeds of mass tourism, post-colonialism and globalization." - Re-reading German literature since 1945, Robert Gordon, Cambridge University The 1930s were one of the most important decades in defining the history of the twentieth century. It saw the rise of right-wing nationalism, the challenge to established democracies and the full force of imperialist aggression. Cultural Encounters makes an important contribution to our understanding of the ideological and cultural forces which were active in defining notions of national identity in the 1930s. By examining the work of writers and journalists from a range of European countries who used the medium of travel writing to articulate perceptions of their own and other cultures, the book gives a comprehensive account of the complex intellectual climate of the 1930s.

A dead man hangs from the portal of St Paul Chapel in Damascus. He was a Muslim officer and he was murdered. But when Detective Barudi sets out to interrogate the man’s mysterious widow, the Secret Service takes the case away from him. Barudi continues to investigate clandestinely and discovers the murderer’s motive: it is a blood feud between the Mushtak and Shahin clans, reaching back to the beginnings of the 20th century. And, linked to it, a love story that can have no happy ending, for reconciliation has no place within the old tribal structures. Rafik Schami dazzling novel spans a century of Syrian history in which politics and religions continue to torment an entire people. Simultaneously, his poetic stories from three generations tell of the courage of lovers who risk death sooner than deny their passions. He has also written a heartfelt tribute to his hometown Damascus and a great and moving hymn to the power of love.

"Erika Engelhaupt, founding editor of National Geographic's Gory Details blog, explores oft-ignored but alluring facets of biology, anatomy, space exploration, nature, and more. Featuring reporting and interviews with leading researchers in the field, Gory Details illuminates the world's most intriguing real-world applications of science"--

This Companion addresses an exciting emerging field of literary scholarship that charts the intersections of postcolonial studies and travel writing.

In this gripping sci-fi noir for fans of The Martian and Quentin Tarantino, when an anarchic android begins wreaking havoc on a moon-based penal colony and bodies start turning up, an exiled detective must decide who he can trust in a city of criminals. Never bang your head against a wall. Bang someone else’s. Purgatory is the lawless moon colony of eccentric billionaire, Fletcher Brass and mecca for war criminals, murderers, and curious tourists alike. You can’t find better drugs, cheaper plastic surgery, or a more ominous travel advisory anywhere in the universe. But trouble is brewing in Brass’s black-market heaven. When an exiled cop comes to enact law and order in this wild new frontier, he finds himself the lead investigator in a series of high-profile murders that puts him toe to toe with the city’s charismatic founder and his equally ambitious daughter. Meanwhile, 2000 km away a memory-wiped android, Leonardo Black rampages across the lunar surface. Programmed with only the notorious “Brass Code”—a compendium of corporate laws that would make Ayn Rand blush—he journeys across the dark side of the moon with only one goal in mind: find Purgatory and conquer it.

"Travel is no longer a past-time but a colossal industry, arguably one of the biggest in the world and second only to oil in importance for many poor countries. One out of 12 people in the world are employed by the tourism industry which contributes $6.5 trillion to the world's economy. To investigate the size and effect of this new industry, Elizabeth Becker traveled the globe. She speaks to the Minister of Tourism of Zambia who thinks licensing foreigners to kill wild animals is a good way to make money and then to a Zambian travel guide who takes her to see the rare endangered sable antelope. She travels to Venice where community groups are fighting to stop the tourism industry from pushing them out of their homes, to France where officials have made tourism their number one industry to save their cultural heritage; and on cruises speaking to waiters who earn $60 a month--then on to Miami to interview their CEO. Becker's sharp depiction reveals travel as a product; nations as stewards. Seeing the tourism industry from the inside out, the world offers a dizzying range of travel options but very few quiet getaways"--