Gail Pool - TraveLit--A blog about travel literature. Even with the best of maps and instruments, we can never fully chart our journeys.

My aim on TraveLit is to introduce readers who share my love of travel literature to good books they may not know about. Mostly classics, some new, the books cover travel in its many forms, from exploration to tourism. I welcome comments on the readings, the reviews, or the fascinating enterprise of travel itself.

Selected Works

Travel Memoir

Lost Among the Baining: Adventure, Marriage, and Other Fieldwork

"My couch is about as far away from Papua New Guinea as one can possibly get. And yet, Gail Pool made her story of the year she and her husband Jeremy spent studying the Baining...feel nearly tangible."--Tahoma Literary Review

"This engaging memoir is peppered with figurative language and realistic conflicts neatly interwoven...The author does an excellent job of peeling back the layers of how insiders and outsiders might simultaneously realize the tension and intentions that lie between them." --Kaavonia Hinton, Foreword Reviews*****

Nonfiction

Faint Praise: The Plight of Book Reviewing in America

"Everyone in the field will applaud Pool's passionate insistence on the importance to literary culture of the serious, informed critique, which is increasingly endangered and in need of such vigorous support." -–Publishers Weekly

"A thoughtful and thought-provoking guide to the artistry and scholarship, not to mention the agony and ecstasy that is part of good book reviewing... Pool's crisp, intelligent, and witty style moves the reader from the lonely and unrewarding depths to the lofty heights of book reviewing." –Lawrence Rubin, Journal of Popular Culture

Anthology

Other People's Mail: An Anthology of Letter Stories

“Captivating stories in an anthology of epistolary fiction from the last 50 years...Warning: Reading these fantastic letters might make your own next trip to the mailbox seem a bore.”-–Kirkus”

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TraveLit--A blog about travel literature.
Even with the best of maps and instruments, we can never fully chart our journeys.

Links of Interest

January 5, 2020

Article on Svalbard (Spitsbergen) in the New York Times Travel Section today, January 5th, 2020. My husband has collected many old maps of Spitsbergen--this 1728 chart by Gerard van Keulen is one of the most beautiful.

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Travel Quotation

January 2, 2020

"I have never managed to lose my old conviction that travel narrows the mind."

--G.K. Chesterton, What I Saw in America