Midway through our conversation about Fresh Air Fiend, Paul Theroux reminds me that during the 15 years in which he wrote the 49 travel essays and articles collected here, he also wrote a major book on China (Riding the Iron Rooster), three additional travel books, a controversial memoir about his friendship with V.S. Naipaul (In Sir Vidia’s Shadow), and more than a handful of novels (including My Secret History, Millroy the Magician, and Kowloon Tong). Something like a dozen books in all.

"It’s not that I was writing these pieces with my left hand," Theroux says, "but I was doing other things at the same time. These pieces illuminate those books, and those books derive somewhat from the experiences recorded here. There’s a certain synchronicity in writing travel pieces and also living my life as a novelist and a travel writer."

This is disheartening. You’d expect—perhaps even hope—that there’d be a significant decline in quality in these occasional pieces, written over the years for publications as varied as Outside magazine, The New York Times, Vogue, and Vanity Fair. And, no doubt, readers will have their favorites and less favorites among them. But in each of the pieces collected in Fresh Air Fiend, the immensely satisfying interplay of observation, wit, and insight (as well as a certain disquieting undertone) that we’ve come to expect from Paul Theroux is very much in evidence.

The essays and articles themselves range through time and across five continents. In the book’s first section, called "Time Travel," Theroux reflects on memory, creativity, and turning 50 and writes about the job of the travel writer. Later, in the book’s title essay, he explains his need for solitary exercise—bicycling, kayaking, sailing—to assuage "the loneliness of the long-distance writer." He spends a solitary week in the Maine woods in wintertime. He travels down the Zambezi River, and down the Yangtze. He writes of meeting Gerard d’Aboville, who rowed across the Pacific Ocean alone in a small boat in 1993. He kayaks in the Philippines and visits Hong Kong on the eve of the hand-over to China.

By my lights, the most interesting pieces in this collection are Theroux’s essays on books of travel. His introductions to reissues of his own books are shapely vignettes from a writer’s autobiography. His essays on the books of other writers — a surprising selection that includes Henry David Thoreau’s Cape Cod, Robinson Crusoe, and Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s memoir of the 1910-1913 Antarctic expedition, The Worst Journey in the World—will add volumes to the avid reader’s ever-growing pile.

"I can’t imagine ever being on a trip and not having something to read," Theroux says. "To me that would be a disaster." And what he reads while traveling becomes part of the background of his essays and articles.

Thus, in his piece on camping in the Maine woods, he mentions rereading Madame Bovary by flashlight. On a trip to London to promote one of his books, he reads F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night. In Amsterdam he reads Henry James’s The Aspern Papers.

"In terms of selection, I take paperbacks that I happen to be reading at the time and ones that I have intended to read," Theroux says. "I’m an omnivorous reader, and if you read a lot, you always have a kind of reading program going, a sort of private scholarship. I have to know the interior of books. And I’m very interested in writers’s lives — what they’re doing at particular stages of their lives, what they’re writing. I recently realized that there were a number of Henry James stories that I hadn’t read. So I started to read all the stories that James wrote when he was around my age, from his early to his late 50s, the years he regarded as his middle years. He had a sort of nervous breakdown then. A lot of those stories are about an older, very James-like writer and a younger writer."

Guide books seem singularly lacking in Theroux’s reading program, probably because he sees a wide gulf between tourism and travel. "There really is an enormous difference between travel in its classic sense and tourism," he says. "Tourism—sightseeing—is expected to be fun. You do it in large groups, it’s very companionable, it’s comfortable, and it’s very pleasant. Travel has to do with discovery, difficulty, and inconvenience. It doesn’t always pay off. There’s a strong element of risk in travel. Time is usually not a constraint for the traveler, but every tourist is under a time constraint. The traveler doesn’t really know where he or she is going, but has a sense of discovery. Tourists know exactly what they want to see and they arrive with a lot of preconceived notions. There’s a kind of enlightenment in classic travel which has nothing to do with materialism or consumerism. By its very nature, travel is cheaper."

A recurrent theme in these essays is that the traveler must approach the world with humility. "If you’re arrogant, you miss a lot," Theroux says.

He adds, "You have to realize that you are just a traveler; you are not home. You need the people you meet. You need their protection. You need their good will. You can’t be presumptuous. You see all sorts of people traveling. There are some amazingly arrogant people who think that because they are American, for example, they can collect hospitality just because they come from a wonderful country that has been very generous. They are sometimes surprised that people don’t give them the respect they think they deserve. If you’re smart, you’ll be very polite, you’ll develop good manners."

According to Theroux, the travel writer—or any writer, for that matter—has the added obligation of telling the truth. His or her truth, that is, since Theroux also notes that every traveler’s journey is different.

Theroux has occasionally taken some heat for his sort of truthtelling. His essay on his friend and fellow travel-writer Bruce Chatwin (1940-1989), which is included in this volume, offended the bearers of the Chatwin flame—until corroborated by a recent biography. His book Riding the Iron Rooster was judged by some to be too harsh on China—until Tiannamen Square. His memoir about V.S. Naipaul continues to stir controversy.

"I have discovered," Theroux says, "that if you tell the truth, you are describing the future. There’s something prophetic about the truth. When you see it and describe it—without stereotypes and preconceptions, but with subtlety—a book can seem like prophecy. So I have no problem telling the truth. But I have a great problem with being untruthful. As my father used to say, ‘You can watch a thief, but you can’t watch a liar.’ "

Can it really be so simple? "It’s sometimes unbelievably difficult," Theroux says. "It’s the reason why it’s probably impossible for me to hold a job writing. I couldn’t work for a newspaper or a magazine or as a copy editor. I could be hired to write my own piece, but I can’t be hired to write someone else’s piece. Telling the truth can make you unemployable. But a writer is basically an unemployed person anyway. It’s something that you just have to live with."

Alden Mudge works for the California Council for the Humanities.

Paul Theroux is one of those writers who needs no introduction. Something of a firebrand early on, but always a critical darling, Theroux has made a career of observing human nature around the world, and regaling his readers with tales (both fact and fiction) of lands and people they will likely never get to see firsthand. Genre-jumping from travel literature to mainstream fiction and back again, Theroux's books have repeatedly appeared on both fiction and nonfiction bestseller lists: Saint Jack, The Mosquito Coast, The Old Patagonian Express, Sunrise with Seamonsters, the list goes on and on (and on).

In the mid-1970s, Theroux embarked on the journey that would become the basis for his bestseller The Great Railway Bazaar. An epic tale of an overland passage from London to the mysterious East, it was the inspiration for a generation of off-the-beaten-path travelers, including yours truly. Thirty years on, Theroux decided to reprise his journey, to see what changes time had wrought, both in the people and places he had visited, and in his perception of them. The chronicle of that trip is Ghost Train to the Eastern Star: On the Tracks of the Great Railway Bazaar.

It must be said, I lost control of my interview with Theroux in the first five minutes, if indeed I ever had it at all. The conversation scampered off in various directions, clearly with a mind of its own, with me furiously jotting down notes in hopes of being able to craft a cohesive narrative at some future date.

"I set off with the intention of writing a travel book," Theroux begins, speaking from his home in Cape Cod, "so in some ways my experiences will be different than those of a pleasure traveler. I write in longhand. I keep a journal or a notebook that I write in every day. I travel fairly light. I don't carry a laptop with me. My only concession to modern technology on this trip was a BlackBerry that doubled as a cell phone and an Internet receiver."

Once outside the sheltering cocoon of "civilized" Europe, Theroux found himself in the Blanche DuBois-esque situation of having to rely on the kindness of strangers: "It's just a question of trust. When I set off, I assume that I need to take risks. Otherwise, nothing will happen, and there will be no story." There isn't any danger of that in Ghost Train to the Eastern Star: Theroux is at the mercy of unkempt taxi drivers, daredevil motorcycle rickshaw pilots and all manner of other perilous ground transport providers, the proverbial accident waiting to happen (all of which must have played hell with his digestive system, but makes great edge-of-the-seat reading for the rest of us). In one vignette, he actually has to crawl in the window of a dilapidated jalopy because the door is broken. No mean feat for a man in his seventh decade.

I was particularly interested in reading and hearing what Theroux would have to say about Japan, my adopted homeland for half the year. He had a superb guide in the person of Japanese author Haruki Murakami, with whom he spent the day seeing the "insider's" Tokyo. "You travel, sometimes you get lucky," he says. "I got lucky and spent the day with Haruki. He knows the city intimately. To be with a writer in his city is the best way to get to know a place. The writer has the key; they are the 'noticers' of everything."

Nevertheless, I find myself a bit at odds with Theroux's depiction of Japan as a somewhat aloof place, less than welcoming to the traveler, and broach that topic with him: "That doesn't surprise me that you would have a different experience of it," he says. "If two people take the same trip, it's not really the same trip, is it? That's normal." He's right, of course.

There is no doubt a certain cachet to being a writer, both with the reading public and with other practitioners of the craft; it can open doors that otherwise might remain firmly closed. In addition to meeting with Murakami, Theroux was able to spend an afternoon chatting with iconic novelist Arthur C. Clarke (2001: A Space Odyssey, Childhood's End) at his home in Sri Lanka shortly before Clarke's death in March. "He asked if I played table tennis." Theroux says. "It was his great hobby, his only sport. He was, of course, too old to play anymore. He was confined to a wheelchair." Theroux was more diplomatic in person: "I'll play you anytime, but I'm sure I'd lose." As an aside, I mention that some 25 years ago, while on a semester-at-sea program, my brother had the opportunity to visit Clarke in Sri Lanka, and had been soundly drubbed by the even-then-elderly pingpong hustler. "How good was your brother?" Theroux asks. "Not too darn bad," I reply, thinking of thumpings I had taken a time or two at his hands.

Ghost Train to the Eastern Star is likely unique in one respect; Theroux notes early on in the book: "What traveler backtracked to take the same trip again? None of the good ones that I know. Greene never returned to the Liberian bush, nor to Mexico, nor to Vietnam. In his late fifties, Waugh dismissed modern travel altogether as mere tourism and a waste of time . . . Robert Byron did not take the road to Oxiana again . . . Chatwin never returned to Patagonia." In revisiting the scenes of his earlier journey, Theroux takes note not only of the changes to the places, but also his markedly different outlook: "The first trip was about five months long. This trip lasted about a year with a short break in the middle. The first time out, I was homesick and very impatient. As you get older, I think you get more patient." This is quite evident in his writing, perhaps the most startling contrast in his work, particularly if you read the new book and one of his earlier travelogues back to back.

Theroux is among the most scrupulously honest of the contemporary traveler/observers, harkening back to a style pioneered by Sir Richard Burton and Robert Byron. He never goes for the sentimental anecdote or the easy laugh, although both can be found in his writing from time to time. Instead, he offers his readers a reporter's-eye view of strange lands: serious and thought-provoking, fleshing out the minuscule details that most of us would never notice on our own, thus giving his readers a sense of "being there," if only vicariously.

Bruce Tierney travels the world from home bases in Japan and eastern Canada.

On the three scientific voyages he led between 1768 and his violent death in 1779, English Navy Captain James Cook explored and mapped vast regions of the previously uncharted world, filling in with astounding accuracy fully a third of the globe. Blue Latitudes is Tony Horwitz’s island-by-island account of those great discoveries and of the man whose infinite resourcefulness ensured their success.

"When I got into the story," Horwitz says, " I found out it was about cannibalism and sex and violence and adventure. Then I became fascinated with Cook, the man. He’s almost an Abe Lincoln story. He grew up in a mud hut in rural Yorkshire, the son of a day laborer, really at the very bottom of British society. Yet through natural talent and a lot of hard work, he rose to the top. He’s one of those astonishing, once-in-a-generation figures who come out of nowhere to transform the world." By poetic coincidence, Horwitz spoke to BookPage about the seafaring adventurer from another storied port, Nantucket, where he was resting up before embarking on his own perilous voyage the book tour.

Although the book is meticulously detailed about Cook and his travels, Horwitz has not written a conventional history. He tells more about following Cook’s trail than he does about the original voyages, although he does weave the two strands of narrative tightly together. Not only does the author seek to see and imagine what the captain encountered, he also hopes to find out what Cook still means to the modern world. In these politically correct times, is he perceived as a discoverer or a despoiler? The resurgence of indigenous cultures is both clarifying and distorting his legacy, Horwitz concludes. "For too long, Cook was viewed in the West only in heroic terms, as this great navigator who set off to discover the world. We know what’s happened since in terms of exploitation and the devastation of native cultures. The exact same thing happened here in America. Lewis and Clark are heroes to many of us. Yet, at the same time, we have to recognize the damage that happened in their wake. . . . So I think it’s important to recognize all that. On the other hand, I don’t think we should swing to the opposite extreme, where we assume that these men were monsters." To his evident dismay, Horwitz finds that in Tahiti, Australia, New Zealand, Hawaii (where the disenchanted locals killed and butchered Cook) and elsewhere he anchored, the explorer is either fading in stature or has been forgotten altogether. Even in his own country, he is a much-diminished presence.

Horwitz first became interested in Cook in the early 1980s when he moved to Sydney after his marriage to native Australian and fellow writer Geraldine Brooks. "I arrived there really knowing very little about the place and in a state of some bewilderment," he says. "I guess, as a history buff, I started boning up on the local history. And the white history of Australia effectively begins with Captain Cook." Horwitz, a former Wall Street Journal reporter whose earlier books include Confederates In the Attic and Baghdad Without a Map, estimates he spent 18 months following Cook’s transoceanic routes and another year writing the book.

Sometimes Horwitz traveled alone, but he was often accompanied and upstaged on his journeys by his friend, the hilarious Roger Williamson, an Englishman transplanted to Australia. Where Horwitz is open and earnest in approaching new experiences, Williamson simply wants to know where the liquor and women are. His are the blunt opinions Horwitz dare not utter. In Yorkshire, after a particularly strenuous evening, Williamson awakens to greet the gray dawn thusly, "Still leaden. Like my stomach. All the forces of nature are focused on my gut. . . . It’s absolutely woeful here. Can we pack up and go now? Head for Costa del Sol for a week? Cook probably sailed near there."

"He’s a foil for me," Horwitz explains, "and I think, honestly, I hide behind him a bit in the book. He’s so quotable that I couldn’t resist the urge to let him do most of the talking. Traveling can get very lonely, and at least I had a mate along for much of the trip."

In trailing Cook, Horwitz shipped out on every available conveyance from rental cars and jet planes to an Alaskan ferry and a replica of the explorer’s most famous vessel, the Endeavour. It was not his intent, he says, to replicate Cook’s actual hardships or to simulate his interminable separations from home and family. Horwitz was rarely away for more than six weeks and makes little mention of his own feelings. "I guess one thing I find annoying sometimes with travel books," he says, "is that they’re all about self-discovery. In Cook’s day, it was about discovery, pure and simple."

As Horwitz sees it, Cook still has something to teach us. "When we talk about the global village’ that we live in today," he says, "it began to a great extent with Cook’s voyages. The part I found most compelling was the drama of first contact between Cook and his men and foreign cultures. He stepped off his ship dozens of times into a complete unknown. I became struck by how open and curious they were and how closed and suspicious we’ve become by comparison. We’re living in a moment when we’re scared of ‘the other.’ Many of us are scared even to fly, yet [Cook] wasn’t afraid of climbing onto a wooden boat and sailing off the edge of the known world, over and over again. He remained open to the cultures he encountered, and, for the most part, he did find a way to communicate and get along. It’s striking to me that here we are over two centuries later and not doing very well at that job."

Edward Morris works out of Nashville and satisfies all his nautical urges at the beach near his summer home in Martha’s Vineyard.

Like many writers, novelist Isabel Allende thinks of herself as an outsider. "I have always been by temperament a dissident and a rebel," she says during a call to her home in Marin County, California. "This has been my struggle all my life."

But it’s one thing to be somewhat alienated from family and social class, as Allende was in her youth, and quite another to be sent into exile from your homeland. Allende fled her native Chile shortly after a CIA-assisted coup on Tuesday, September 11, 1973, led to the overthrow and death of her uncle Salvador Allende Gossens, the democratically elected president of Chile. The coup resulted in a brutal military dictatorship led by General Augusto Pinochet. From exile in Venezuela, on January 8, 1981, Allende began writing a letter to her grandfather, an old-school Chilean who was nearing his 100th birthday and in failing health. The letter soon developed into Allende’s mesmerizing first novel, The House of the Spirits, which marked the beginning of her extraordinary literary career.

Outsiders almost always have an intense and ambivalent longing for the inside. This is certainly true of Allende. While her marvelous new memoir, My Invented Country: A Nostalgic Journey Through Chile, offers stinging criticism of her native land – its machismo, its religious and political oppression, its shameful treatment of native populations – Allende’s love for Chile is so evident and eloquent that many readers will consider packing their bags and booking the next flight to Santiago.

"When you are born in a place, especially a small place that feels like a village, you put up with the bad things and love the good things," Allende says. "There is a strong sense of community, of family, or extended family that still exists there. People in Chile will tell you, No, that’s over, it’s gone, it’s not like it was before.’ But coming from the United States, it’s the first thing that you see."

Allende has lived in the San Francisco Bay area since she met and married an American attorney, whose life and adventures were the basis for her novel The Infinite Plan. "California resembles Chile more than any other place in the United States," she says. "Not only the landscape and the vegetation and the weather, but the fact that some sense of Hispanic culture is very present here. My husband says that Chile looks like California looked 40 years ago."

Since Pinochet stepped down in 1994 and democratic institutions have slowly returned to Chile, Allende has been making annual visits home to see her mother, stepfather and members of her large extended family. Some of her family members read the manuscript for My Invented Country and, she says, "everyone had a different opinion." "I thought the book was going to be terribly criticized in Chile. But, actually, it was pirated immediately, it was sold in the streets, it became number one on the bestseller list, and the reviews have been great."

This is a surprise, and Allende explains it this way: "Many years ago when I was young, I used to write feminist articles, humorous articles, making fun of men and the things that men do because they are so macho. I would get loads of fan letters from men who enjoyed the articles and said they had a friend just like the man I described. It was always a friend. It was never them. I think that is what happened with this book. Readers think this is how the other Chileans are."

Allende’s sense of humor in conversation and on the page is enthralling. And as readers of her novels and previous memoir, Paula, know, she is a gifted storyteller who forges an enchanting amalgam of memory and imagination. "Memory and imagination are so closely intertwined that I can hardly separate them," Allende says. "If you and I see the same event, we will perceive it differently and we will remember it differently. When I wrote my very first memoir, which was Paula, I was in an altered state. My daughter Paula was dying. But even so, in the process of writing the book, I was perfectly conscious of the fact that I would choose what I was going to write and what I was going to omit, what adjectives I was selecting to describe a situation. That is an exercise in imagination; that’s a choice. Because if we were to remember without imagination, we would use no adjectives. It would be just nouns. But in life we remember the color, the flavor, the emotion. Not the facts."

According to Allende, the facts of life are mixed. "The world is a horrible place but also a wonderful place. For every horrible person out there doing evil, a thousand people are doing good. But good is silent, discrete, unassuming, whereas evil is so noisy. We only hear about the evil in the world."

In the Chile of Allende’s youth and, in a more menacing way under the dictatorship, "life was supposed to be uncomfortable and unsafe. . . . Even if you broke your neck tripping on the sidewalk there was no one to blame. It was your own fate."

This perspective made it very difficult for Allende to feel at home in the United States. "When I came here I had the feeling that this country was invulnerable, invincible, that the people had the arrogance of the winners, and that I could never belong here. The idea that you could go through life without fear, that you could go through life always feeling safe, that you are insured against every hazard of life, was just so foreign to me."

Exactly 28 years after her uncle’s violent demise led to her exile from Chile, on Tuesday, September 11, 2001, Allende discovered a suddenly vulnerable America and felt she "had gained a country." In conversation, Allende says My Invented Country "was born out of a crazy idea when my grandson Alejandro said ‘I think you are going to live at least three more years,’ and I wondered, well, where do I want to live them." That is no doubt true. But it is also true that the two September 11s mark the metaphorical beginning and end of Allende’s nostalgic journey. The path she follows between these two points vividly illustrates the good humor, humane spirit, tough mind and open heart we will all require to create a viable home in our new world.

Kinky Friedman’s psychedelic tour of the Texas capitalOn a sunny Saturday morning in Austin, Texas, I’m trying to get Kinky Friedman on the phone, a process that’s proving as complicated as the plot of one of his mystery novels. Treated to the greeting on his answering machine, I get an earful of exuberance: “This is Richard K.D. ‘Big Dick’ Friedman, the next guvenuuuhhh of the great state of Texas! Please leave a message!”Although the word “governor” is punctuated by a slow, faux, Southern drawl, the recording isn’t a prank. Armed with a Texas – sized persona, the support of author Molly Ivins and a slew of memorable slogans (including “How Hard Could It Be?” and “Why the Hell Not?”), the popular author and songwriter intends to run for office in 2006. But more on that later.When I finally reach him at his ranch in the Texas Hill Country for a discussion of his new book, The Great Psychedelic Armadillo Picnic: A “Walk” in Austin, Friedman is flustered. “My cigar clipper just blew up. I’m having a rough morning here,” he says. But he’s soon at ease and explaining the challenges of writing a book about the city in which he grew up. The son of a University of Texas professor, Friedman himself attended UT before joining the Peace Corps and embarking on a career as a writer/musician.”My big problem in writing the book was that every restaurant I like went belly – up about 20 years ago,” explains Friedman, who will turn 60 next month. “Now I have a choice of writing about what used to be there, or grumbling about how it’s changed. I tried to be a good spiritual sport about it. If it had been someplace like Hawaii, say, it would not have been difficult to write the book, because I don’t have any history there.”Readers shouldn’t fear: Armadillo is an easy ride, a quick trip unmarred by the author’s inner conflict. Providing plenty of background on the Texas capital, along with games, quizzes and Austin – based anecdotes, Armadillo is vintage Friedman, an unconventional little travel guide that offers a whimsical mosaic of one of the hottest spots in the country. With chapters on outdoor attractions, noteworthy landmarks and shopping, Armadillo delivers a sense of the city’s singular appeal, a taste of the town’s laid – back allure. Best of all, the book bears the stamp of the inimitable Kinkster. No doubt about it, reading this brief volume is a blast.”Austin is a town that really does have native charm,” Friedman says. “But like all the rest of America, and the world – wherever people go – some of the charm starts to slip away. All cities look the same, mostly, so outsiders are usually amazed when they see Austin, because it’s a beautiful, natural city.”It’s also a town with enough live music to rival Nashville. To get a taste of the true Texas sound, Armadillo tells fans where to go (The Broken Spoke, Threadgill’s), and who to hear (Billy Joe Shaver, Toni Price). A list of the city’s top 12 restaurants directs visitors to the tastiest spots in a city full of good food. (“After a night of festivities,” Friedman writes, “a little food is necessary so you don’t wake up feeling like there’s a small Aryan child playing an accordion in your head.”) For historical context, there’s also a section on famous Austinites – a hodgepodge of one – of – a – kind characters such as Jerry Jeff Walker, O. Henry and Charles Whitman, the guy who climbed the Texas Tower at UT in the summer of 1966 and shot 45 people.When discussing his own books, Friedman is demure. Of his work as a novelist, he says, “Everybody finds what they can do. Writing mysteries is something that seems to have clicked, because now there’s about, hell, 19 of them that I’ve churned out – I mean carefully crafted.” He cites Paul Theroux, Charles Bukowski, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Robert Louis Stevenson as his favorite authors. His final mystery novel, due out in April, is called Ten Little New Yorkers, and in it, the Kinkster dies. That’s right, the popular series, which features a private eye named Kinky Friedman, is finally winding down.”It’s a literary suicide, which I guess is more than a literary suicide since I am the character,” says Friedman. “It’s close to a real suicide. I’ve attempted to kill myself for years now,” he says. “The way I think I’ll do it is to jump through a ceiling fan. I was trying to do it the other night at Antone’s [a bar in Austin], and this fellow was giving me an assist, a leg up, but I still couldn’t reach it.”Extinguishing the Kinky character will, of course, result in many disappointed readers. “Let’s say I do kill myself,” speculates Friedman. “Who could Kinky Friedman readers read who would pick up the slack? I donct know what they will do.”Next up for Friedman: a career shift, as he hopes to become the next governor of Texas. For once, Kinky ain’t kidding. He plans to run as an Independent and feels his prospects are “looking very, very good. The first poll in which my name was included, done by the San Antonio Express – News, came out extremely well. The question was who would you pay $250 to go to dinner with? The list was George Bush, Dick Cheney, John Kerry, John Edwards, Hilary Clinton and Kinky Friedman. I came in third,” the author says, “right behind Bush and Hilary Clinton.”The move into Texas politics seems natural for Friedman, a bachelor who has said he is married to the good ole Lone Star State. Indeed, his new book is nothing if not a reflection of his affection for home. That’s partly why The Great Psychedelic Armadillo Picnic succeeds so well in capturing the attraction of Austin.”The city does seem to be a magnet for people,” Friedman says. “I notice as I travel around the world, the one place people really want to come to is Austin. Part of the reason is that the world does love Texas. It may not love America, but it loves Texas.”So does Kinky.

Life in the hills of Italy seems so fulfilling for Frances Mayes, one might wonder why she would ever leave, even if, as she says, she can no longer sit quietly reading at the local trattorias and cafes. It was an ongoing search for places that feel as comfortable as her adopted Tuscan hometown of Cortona that inspired the grand tour at the heart of her latest book, A Year in the World: Journeys of a Passionate Traveller. Fans of Under The Tuscan Sun and its sequel Bella Tuscany shouldn’t despair, however, because Mayes also spends time in her beloved Tuscan farmhouse, Bramasole—which is, as always, endearingly in need of attention (a falling wall here, a nest of mice there, water issues).

Mayes and her husband, fellow poet Ed Mayes, divide their time between Italy and America, where they recently relocated from the Bay Area to North Carolina. Though she has written a guide to infusing life with the style and spirit of Tuscany and developed a line of Tuscan-inspired furniture with Drexel Heritage, Mayes laughingly tells BookPage during a break from unpacking that her new house is merely "taking on the air of less chaos," rather than that of Tuscany.

Mayes and her husband made the move to North Carolina to be near her daughter and three-year-old grandson, Willie. "He’s been to Italy five times already," she says. Last summer, the couple enrolled the youngster in a nursery school near Bramasole. "Of course he started picking up Italian," she says with obvious pride, adding that she would love for him to achieve fluency in the language, something to which she and Ed still aspire. Mayes says she wants to impart to her grandson a sense of being a world citizen.

This idea of belonging to the world is the central theme of A Year in the World. In fact, Mayes had originally planned to call the book "At Home in the World," but changed the title when another book came out with that name. Her finished book condenses five years of travel into one, arranged by month. In January, for example, Mayes and Ed are in Spain, where she is delighted by Madrid’s Thyssen-Bornemisza museum. In August, the couple joins friends in Turkey for an experience straight out of Agatha Christie—day tours of archeological sites, night swims in the Mediterranean and accommodations onboard a yacht. "Fortunately no one got pushed over," Mayes says with a laugh.

Mayes displays her deep talent for description throughout the book, whether in discussing scenery, shopping for tiles or simply retreating to her hotel for a candle-lit bath or curling up with a stack of books. She is in her element, as ever, recounting meals—even those she hasn’t eaten. A visit to the Alhambra in Granada, for example, inspires the following reverie: "A few rugs, a pile of cushions, a brazier, and we’d be ready to rinse our hands in orange flower water, relax, and settle down for a feast of lamb tagine, stuffed eggplants and cabbages flavored with coriander and cinnamon, preserved lemons, chickpeas with saffron, and a pastry pie of pigeons."

Sure, most of us could do without the pigeons, but Mayes is an intrepid gastronomic explorer. "I feel like my whole appreciation of food has just expanded enormously because of these travels," she says. "To me, that is the quickest way into a culture: what they eat and how they celebrate and how they gather around the table and who’s at the table. Those things reveal so much about values and family and friendship and just the everyday life in a place." In A Year in the World, Mayes’ search for a regional cookbook in Lisbon leads her to a chef who gives her an impromptu cooking class, a slice of perhaps the best chocolate cake on the planet and a list of restaurants for sampling both authentic and extrapolated Portuguese cuisine.

These chance encounters and other little accidents of travel are another theme of the book. Whether it’s a passport left behind, a hotel power outage, transporting goatskin rugs or a fortuitous Internet search for accommodations in Fez, Mayes and Ed carry on with a spirit that should inspire any traveler—actual or armchair. But for all of that, travel doesn’t necessarily come easy for Mayes and she longs for a perfect pre-departure evening, right down to a skillfully packed suitcase, a good night’s sleep and no mishaps.

Mayes faces a perennial tug-of-war between setting off or staying at home. Even when striking out on the ambitious itinerary of A Year in the World she had one thing in mind: home. "I went to places that I had always dreamed of as places to live," she says. "For me, it was an exploration of the idea of home. I decided to go to these places and see what it would take to be at home there." So she threw herself into her research, consulting both literary and nuts-and-bolts travel guides. "I love to read the poetry and the history, hear the music, and do all of the things that people who live there actually do," she says. A Year in the World is laced with those references.

This immersion ties into what Mayes refers to as the "arc" of travel, a cycle that begins before the trip and continues when one returns home with a memento or two and perhaps new friends. "People we met on our trip—the rug dealer in Istanbul, the chef in Portugal—they have both been to visit us," she says. "The chef came to Italy with his wife and stayed with us and the rug dealer has been to California two or three times. Lots of little correspondences go on; that’s how the trip keeps on going."

Obviously another way the trips continue for Mayes is through her cooking. "The Portuguese soups, particularly, I have just grown to love," she says. "We’ve made quite a few of them in Italy." She pauses, then adds, "One odd aspect of living in two places is that the book you want is always in the other place, so I don’t have the Portuguese cookbooks here." With those treasured cookbooks far from her new home in North Carolina, the American South has influenced Mayes’ kitchen instead. "It’s surprising how quickly I’ve started cooking the old recipes again," Mayes, a Georgia native, says. "I’m going to be paying for it now," she laughs.

After five years of travelling, she says returning to the South feels natural and appropriate; she feels right at home. And yet, Mayes is already preparing for more travels—following her book tour she’ll be off to India.

Author photo by Edward Mayes.