Over the years I’ve often planned hypothetical road trips for myself, drawing zigzagging lines with a Sharpie across maps of the United States, hopeful to take my own journey one day. But of all the lines I have drawn, my favorite always takes me a southern route from the North East down through Georgia, Mississippi and Louisiana. I believe one reason it’s my favorite route is because the South has been so vividly portrayed in literature. From the grandiose to the grotesque, Southern writers from Flannery O’Connor to Margaret Mitchell have painted brilliant portraits of the South in their works.

While I long to witness the natural beauty the South has to offer, see the Mississippi River and experience the splendor of the Louisiana bayou, I am sure even these urges have their root in my experience of Southern literature.  So it only makes sense that on any road trip through the Southern U.S., literary travelers pay homage to the literary greats that lived and wrote there. While New Orleans is well known for its associations with literature, from Tennessee Williams to Truman Capote, the South is brimming with less well-known but equally fascinating ways to connect with literary history.

In Atlanta, Georgia, let the wind take you in the direction of the Margaret Mitchell House and Museum on Peachtree Street.  While it took Mitchell almost a decade to finish the epic Gone with the Wind, you can tour the museum in a couple of hours, viewing her living space and a selection of her letters.  Travel to Atlanta this April 20-22^nd, and receive free admission to the house during the Atlanta Dogwood Festival, an event that draws artists from around the world.

If you take your adventure to Savannah, visit the one-time residence of writer Flannery O’Connor.  While A Good Man is Hard to Find, the author’s childhood home, located on East Charlton Street, is not!  The house where the author resided from 1925-1938 contains some of the original furnishings.  For more O’Connor memorabilia continue on to Georgia College and State University, where there is a room dedicated to the famous alumnus that houses her writing desk and typewriter, among other artifacts including the author’s own personal library of more than 700 titles.

In Mississippi, honor William Faulkner with a visit to his Rowan Oak estate located in Oxford.  Originally built in 1844, the property is now owned by the University of Mississippi and visitors are admitted to view the space where Faulkner lived and worked for over thirty years.  The Oxford, MS Convention & Visitors Bureau offers a more extensive map of “Faulkner Country.” So download one here, and meander at your own pace through the stomping ground of this twentieth century great.

Like John Steinbeck wrote in Travels with Charley, “we do not take a trip; a trip takes us.” The next stop is up to us.

While many are drawn to New Orleans for Mardi Gras, there’s another late Winter festival worth its weight in gold. After all the beads have been tossed and the confetti has been swept away, it’s time for literary travelers from around the world to take over the resplendent city.  March 21^st marks the start of the five day Tennessee Williams New Orleans Literary Festival.  The Festival started in 1987 to celebrate the city’s immense literary culture.

According to the press release, “The five-day fête honors the legendary Tennessee Williams, his works, and literary life in the adopted city he called his ‘spiritual home’ and features two days of master classes; a roster of lively discussions among distinguished panelists; celebrity interviews; theater, food and music events; a scholars’ conference; a poetry slam, writing marathon and breakfast book club; French Quarter literary walking tours; a book fair; short fiction, poetry and one-act play competitions; and special evening events and parties.”  With so many events to choose from, five days doesn’t seem like nearly enough time to experience the festival as well as get a taste of all the city has to offer.  In order to squeeze the most into your experience there are a few easy ways to multi-task.

Since no literary trip to New Orleans would be complete without a walking tour of the multitude of literary landmarks that cover the city, make sure to get your fill with Heritage Literary Tours.  Led throughout the year by retired University of New Orleans Literature professor Dr. Kenneth Holditch, as part of the Festival he will be offering a tour that focuses on landmarks relating to Tennessee Williams in particular.

As for accommodations, there is no shortage of literary culture at the historic Hotel Monteleone, which is offering a limited number of rooms at a discounted rate for attendees of the festival. The 125 year old hotel is a literary landmark in and of itself, as it was once frequented by Truman Capote, William Faulkner, Eudora Welty and Williams himself, as well as being featured in the writing of Ernest Hemingway in “The Night Before Battle.”  Suites at the hotel now bear the names of Welty, Williams, Faulkner and Hemingway.  The Hotel Monteleone also offers a Literary History Walking Tour, which spotlights the hotel’s place as a literary landmark.  Led by local historian Glenn De Villier, the tour begins and ends in the hotel’s Carousel Bar, which was a favorite of Williams’ and immortalized in the works of Williams, Hemingway and Welty.

In lieu of souvenirs, do a little shopping while experiencing further literary heritage by visiting Faulkner House Books, located at the site of Faulkner’s 1925 residence, where he wrote his first novel, Soldiers’ Pay.  This new and used book store specializes in Faulkner, Williams, and Southern Literature with an emphasis on New Orleans and Louisiana. Faulkner House is a national literary landmark, and for book lovers and history aficionados, not to be missed.

Williams once said, “if I can be said to have a home, it is New Orleans, which has provided me with more material than any other part of the country.” So, take a page from the literary sentinel and find inspiration in the sites and sounds of the city of New Orleans.  Whether traveling to New Orleans for the Festival, or just to experience the city’s rich culture, there is no time like the present to book your trip. 

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Featuring Tennessee Williams

Key West Friday: Having Dinner With Tennessee Williams 

The Loss of a Teardrop Diamond

Jeffrey Eugenides, Artwork by Dan Park

There are a heck of a lot of “Best of 2011″ lists coming out this week. There’s the best music, the best films, and, of course, the best books. But with so many “best of” lists, put out by practically every blog, magazine, and newspaper around, it’s hard to tell which books really came out on top.

But fear not! After combing through some well respected sources’ “best of” lists, it was clear which books were the real winners. The lists consulted included those compiled by Publisher’s Weekly, Kirkus Review, National Public Radio, Barnes & Noble, The Economist, Paste Magazine, Slate Magazine, Goodreads, the Washington Post, the Washington Examiner, the Village Voice, the Los Angeles Public Library, The New Republic, Amazon, The Horn Book, Esquire, and The New York Times.

There were, of course, books that made it onto just one or two lists, but to really be the best of the year, a book’s got to make a bigger splash than that. Therefore, the books that made it onto three or more of these lists are posted below on this compilation of what may as well be called “The Best of the Best Books of 2011″:

The Top 15 Fiction Books:
1. The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides
2. 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami
3. State of Wonder by Ann Patchett
4. Open City by Teju Cole
5. The Tiger’s Wife by Tea Obreht
6. A Dance with Dragons by George R. R. Martin
7. Train Dreams by Denis Johnson
8. 11/22/63 by Stephen King
9. The Submission by Amy Waldman
10. The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach
11. The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern
12. The Tragedy of Arthur by Arthur Phillips
13. Swamplandia! by Karen Russell
14. The Paris Wife by Paula McLain
15. The Pale King by David Foster Wallace

The Top 13 Nonfiction Books:
1. Blood, Bones, and Butter by Gabrielle Hamilton
2. Blue Nights by Joan Didion
3. The Swerve: How the World Became Modern by Stephen Greenblatt
4. Bossypants by Tina Fey
5. Townie: A Memoir by Andre Dubus III
6. In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin by Erik Larson
7. Hemingway’s Boat by Paul Hendrickson
8. The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood by James Gleick
9. Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention by Manning Marable
10. Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
11. Catherine the Great by Robert K. Massie
12. 1861: The Civil War Awakening by Adam Goodheart
13. Charles Dickens: A Life by Claire Tomalin

The Top 11 Young Adult Books:
1. Divergent by Veronica Roth
2. The Scorpio Races by Maggie Stiefvater
3. Daughter of Smoke and Bone by Laini Taylor
4. Between Shades of Gray by Ruta Sepetys
5. Blink & Caution by Tim Wynne-Jones
6. Beauty Queens by Libba Bray
7. Anya’s Ghost by Vera Brosgol
8. The Future of Us by Jay Asher and Carolyn Mackler
9. The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making by Catherynne M. Valente
10. A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness
11. Chime by Franny Billingsley

The clear favorite of critics is The Marriage Plot, which shows up on seven different lists. Additionally, 1Q84, Divergent, and Blood, Bones, and Butter all made it onto six. It goes to show how diverse readers’ (and editors’) tastes are across America. Clearly, though, there’s still common ground, and if you’re looking for a good book to devour this holiday season, chances are you’ll find plenty of worthwhile material on this list.

The National Book Award is given to writers by writers, recognizing the best of American literature since 1950. This coveted award has advanced the careers of both emerging and established authors, and many past winners have become staples of American literature, including William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, Thomas Pynchon, Rachel Carson, and William Carlos Williams – just to name a few.

Each year, the National Book Foundation receives many entries, but to be eligible, a book must be written by an American citizen and published by an American publisher between December 1 of the previous year and November 30 of the current year; no entry can be self-published. This year, 1,223 books were submitted to the foundation, which were then narrowed down to only twenty finalists, or five finalists per category: Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, and Young People’s Literature. Judging each category are five reputable authors who are doing great work in their genre, and who are sometimes past finalists or winners themselves.

Although there has always been a ceremony to announce the winners of the award, for the first time in history, the 2011 award ceremony will be webcast live from New York City tonight at 8 pm EST.  There is no registration necessary: the broadcast will be featured on the foundation’s homepage, www.nationalbook.org. Here viewers can watch, in real time, the winners in each of the four categories accept their awards, and see Mitchell Kaplan (co-founder of Miami Book Fair International) and John Ashbery (National Book Award and Pulitzer-winning poet)  receive their lifetime achievement awards. If that’s not exciting enough, the host of the event will be John Lithgow, a talented author, actor, and musician who has written ten books and acted in films and television shows such as Dexter, the Shrek franchise, Terms of Endearment, and Dreamgirls.

This year boasts an incredibly talented group of finalists, all of whom are after the hefty $10,000 prize, a bronze sculpture, and the respect of writers and readers all over the country. These finalists are:

For Fiction:

-       Andrew Krivak,  HE SOJOURN (Bellevue Literary Press)
-       Téa Obreht, THE TIGER’S WIFE (Random House)
-       Julie Otsuka, THE BUDDHA IN THE ATTIC (Alfred A. Knopf)
-       Edith Pearlman, BINOCULAR VISION (Lookout Books)
-       Jesmyn Ward, SALVAGE THE BONES (Bloomsbury USA)

For Nonfiction:

-       Deborah Baker, THE CONVERT: A TALE OF EXILE AND EXTREMISM (Graywolf Press)
-       Mary Gabriel, LOVE AND CAPITAL: KARL AND JENNY MARX AND THE BIRTH OF A REVOLUTION (Little, Brown, and Company)
-       Stephen Greenblatt, THE SWERVE: HOW THE WORLD BECAME MODERN (W.W. Norton)
-       Manning Marable, MALCOLM X: A LIFE OF REINVENTION (Viking Press)
-       Lauren Redniss, RADIOACTIVE: MARIE & PIERRE CURIE, A TALE OF LOVE AND FALLOUT (It Books)

For Poetry:

-       Nikky Finney, HEAD OFF & SPLIT (TriQuarterly)
-       Yusef Komunyakaa, THE CHAMELEON COUCH (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
-       Carl Phillips, DOUBLE SHADOW (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux)
-       Adrienne Rich, TONIGHT NO POETRY WILL SERVE: POEMS 2007-2010 (W.W. Norton)
-       Bruce Smith, DEVOTIONS (University of Chicago Press)

For Young People’s Literature:

-       Franny Billingsley, CHIME (Dial Books)
-       Debby Dahl Edwardson, MY NAME IS NOT EASY (Marshall Cavendish)
-       Thanhha Lai,  INSIDE OUT AND BACK AGAIN (Harper)
-       Albert, Marrin, FLESH AND BLOOD SO CHEEP: THE TRIANGLE FIRE AND ITS LEGACY (Alfred A. Knopf)
-       Gary D. Schmidt, OKAY FOR NOW (Clarion Books)

Tune in to the live feed now to see which four finalists walk away with the prize!

My mind retraces all the amazing and memorable moments and I wish that sometime soon I will again be on the road. Traveling is not only an adventure for me—it is a time to be free of the daily stress and daily uncertainty of what am I going to do with life? I feel that more often than not I am ‘boogled down’ by uncertainty; I am driven by the need to endlessly search for a tangible answer. However, traveling makes me feel as though this answer is right in front of me, as if this answer is unimportant, a mere speck of what is truly out there. When I travel, this mere speck is just a weightless distraction left behind.

As I was nearing the end of my trip across the country, I found myself at Seven Falls in Colorado Springs, Colorado. It was enchanting. The color of the mountainside against the beautiful blue sky and forest green trees on my way towards the entrance, promised an unforgettable afternoon.

Entrance fee was $9.25, but well worth the hike and afternoon out of the car.

Seven Falls is located in the South Cheyenne Canyon. It received its title based upon the water that cascades from 181 feet in seven distinct steps. The water falls from the southern edge of Pikes Peak and allows for a picturesque, tranquil sight.

In addition to the waterfalls, Seven Falls has 2 hiking trails: Trail to Inspiration Point and Trail to Midnight Fall. The Trail to Inspiration Point is a mile long, intermediate hike that is the location of the original gravesite of Helen Hunt Jackson. Helen Hunt Jackson was a writer of the 1800s. She is best known for her interest in the mistreatment of American Indians by government agents. This hike was a great way to stretch my legs and breathe heavy as the hill sat in front of me. The sun was beautiful as it set upon the mountainside and the clouds swiftly moved across the evening sky.

Seven Falls is a gem of this country. It is a secluded area, with rushing water as its soundtrack. It is a great place to become in touch with nature and breathe in the amazing fresh air that this earth has to offer.

It makes my list for the top 10 places to visit in America. What’s on your list?

This may explain why so many intellectuals are drawn to one another.  It’s not necessarily because they have a lot in common (other than shockingly high IQs) or because they can’t communicate with the general population (though sometimes this is also true).  Even the most brilliant minds need to be fed in order to grow and the best food is foreign thought.

At least, this is how I make sense of certain intellectual friendships, like that of John Steinbeck and the famed biologist Edward F. Ricketts.  Though their genius was in very different fields–Steinbeck in literature, and Ricketts in science–their relationship helped both men grow and learn.  In the cramped walls of Ricketts’ lab in Monterey, California, they bounced ideas back and forth, traded inspiration, and opened new channels of thought.

In our most recent feature article, writer Victor Walsh travels to Monterey to see Ricketts’ lab, which has been left basically as it was at the time of his death in 1948.  Still filled with specimens and Ricketts’ personal belongings, the lab stands testimony to a great intellectual friendship–and the work of a great scientist.

Take a moment out of your busy weekend to read about Walsh’s visit to Cannery Row and learn a little more about the life of one of America’s greatest writers with our piece A Meeting of Minds: John Steinbeck and Edward F. Ricketts at the Lab in Monterey. And if you want to learn more about Steinbeck’s biography, please take a look at any of our other great articles on the Of Mice and Men author.

Happy reading.

For a lot of people, “summer reading” means one of two things. Either they’re referring to the mandatory “great books” assigned by High school English teachers or they’re talking about the light, “trashy,” less-than-literary novels commonly termed “beach reads.”  But when I hear the term “summer books,” I think about something else entirely.

For me, a summer book is one that I return to over and over, one that breathes heat out of its pages and soothes with its particular brand of fantasy.  These books feel carefree – reading a summer classic is about as satisfying as climbing a tree, or diving into a swimming hole.

My all-time favorite summer book is The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, though Huck Finn comes in at a close second.  These novels perfectly capture the mischievousness of childhood, the excitement and the continual yearning for freedom.  They speak to a part of me that still sometimes secretly longs to run away from home and join a circus, or a band of traveling musicians, or just float lazily down a river, ignoring all of my other responsibilities.  With his sharp wit and ability to capture the local color perfectly, Twain transports me back to a different time, one that only appears simpler at first glance.

Another reason I love Twain has less to do with his characters and more to do with the setting.  Twain is an American Author.  He is quite possibly the quintessential American Author.  Not only does he write in that hilarious, rambling, biting-yet-kind voice that feels so American, he also manages to inject each of his novels all the beauty of our country while remaining authentic.  He does not sugar-coat his books; childhood is not a perfect place, free of tension.  Tom and Huck may not be aware of the great injustices of the world at the beginning of their journeys, but as they grow and progress, they come to see our world for what it really is.

This July 4th, do America proud and pick up a book by one of our many great authors.  If Twain isn’t your cup of tea, how about some Faulkner?  Or Melville?  (May I suggest Benito Cereno?)  Or, if you don’t have that much time, check out one of our articles on Mark Twain, which include A Revealing Interview with Terrell Dempsy, Author of Searching for Jim: Slavery in Sam Clemens’s World, Mark Twain in Unionville, Nevada, and Finding Mark Twain’s Hannibal.   You can also search for other American authors at LiteraryTraveler.com.

Happy reading!

I have always felt that Edith Wharton came from the F. Scott Fitzgerald school of writing.  Like Fitzgerald, Wharton uses words to the utmost advantage; she does not let the reader guess at her meaning, but rather paints with phrases, colors and tints our view with her writing.  She has the ability to transport a reader back in time, to the Age of Innocence, or move us through place, to the winding streets of Morocco.

In our newest feature article, writer Inka Piegsa-Quischotte travels through Fez, searching not only for the Morocco of Wharton’s description, but also for a house. She is looking to purchase a mini-palace; a burrow of tiny bedrooms and storage spaces that she can call home.  Like me, Piegsa-Quischotte has been seduced by Wharton’s perfect sentences and her ability to conjure up an entire world through a single phrase.  Clip-clopping on the back of a mule through the covered alleys and tented streets, Piegsa-Quischotte can’t help but remember the poetry of Wharton’s language, and the aptness of her descriptions.

This week, join us in Morocco, where we ride on colorful saddles and smell the many scents of Fez in Pink Saddles & Djellabas, Edith Wharton’s Fez In Morocco. Allow yourself to be guided by Piegsa-Quischotte and her new-found friends as they work their way through a foreign land, searching for beauty and something far more lasting: a room of one’s own.

• The American Book Review asked several university professors to contribute some nominees to their list of America’s 40 Worst Books.  Some of their choices are – in our humble opinion – debatable.  They’ve included a personal favorite of mine, The Great Gatsby, on the grounds that it is “smug.”  Also on the list: Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road and Cormac McCarthy’s All The Pretty Horses.
• On this day, in 1948, Jack Kerouac turned 26.  He wrote in his journal:  “Guess what?! – on my birthday today, wrote 4500-words(!) – scribbling away till six-thirty in the morning next day. A real way to celebrate another coming of age. And am I coming of age?”  Check out Barnes and Nobel Review for more reflections.
• Dave Eggers, novelist and founder of McSweeney’s, is also blowing out the candles on his birthday cake today.  Help him celebrate (in spirit, if not in person) by checking out  this fascinating interview with Eggers about his new book, Zeitoun.
• Is it possible to become a famous poet simply through social networking?  That’s the argument Jim Behrle made the other day when speaking to a crowd at the St. Mark’s Poetry Project.  “Self promotion is the only kind of promotion left,” he said.
• Ebooks are a little scary to many of us bibliophiles, but they may be the greenest way to access academic books and other frequently-updated texts. However, the case for the e-reader is a little more complicated than it might initially seem.
• And finally, congratulations to author Gail Haveren, translator Dayla Bilu, and everyone at Melville House.  Haveren’s novel The Confessions of Noa Weber was just awarded the 2010 Translated Book Award For Fiction.

Raised by two former hippies, I have been hearing stories about this amazing decade since I was old enough to teeter around in my mother’s worn fringed boots.   Upon entering my teenage years, I discovered Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Cool Aid Acid Test and through it, Ken Kesey and his band of merry pranksters.  One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest was the next logical step in my counter-cultural education.  Fortunately, Kesey’s sensitive and nuanced portrayal of those that society deemed unfit ages well, and felt just as relevant to a child of the baby boomers as it did to the original generation of free-thinkers.

Kesey was in many ways the quintessential hippy, and Cuckoo’s Nest can be read as a manifesto of the anti-establishment creed.  It is fitting, then, that in our newest feature article, writer Paul Millward takes a trip to the place where it all began, the city that has come to embody a certain ideal of the counter-culture experience: San Francisco.

Like many before him, Millward views his visit to Haight-Ashbury as kind of a pilgrimage, a journey to discover some lost time and place.  Join Millward in rediscovering Kesey’s legacy by reading our newest feature: Flower Children of the 60′s & Ken Kesey, Father of LSD and Hippies.

But even while tripping through Millward’s piece, don’t forget about the other, more mainstream side of 1960’s culture, featuring the literary wordsmiths of the hit television series Mad Men.  Take a look: Mad Men: Creating a Perfect World on the Avenue of Dreams.