NOVEL DESTINATIONS: Literary Landmarks From Jane Austen's Bath to Ernest Hemingway's Key West
Shannon McKenna Schmidt and Joni Rendon
National Geographic
Travel
Hardcover: 9781426202773
Paperback: 9781426204548

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Whether you’re a savvy wanderer who knows that a good book makes the perfect traveling companion, or a dedicated armchair adventurer who wants to learn more about the places favorite novelists have made their own, this entertaining, informative volume is ideal for bookcase and suitcase alike.

Here are classic literary landscapes, from the wild moorlands of the Brontë sisters and Wordsworth’s daffodil-dotted Lake District to Dostoyevsky’s brooding St. Petersburg. Stateside you’ll travel across Robert Frost’s New England to the Deep South of William Faulkner and the rolling hills of Jack London’s California ranch land. Featured sites and events include everything from author houses and museums to legendary libraries, festivals, and walking tours. A sampling of restaurants, pubs, inns, and hotels where famous scribes once dined and dozed rounds out your literary itinerary.

The second half of the book explores ten locales immortalized by famed novelists, illuminating little-known stories about the places so indelibly associated with their work. There is Jane Austen, famously linked with the resort town of Bath despite her preference for the simple pleasures of country life over the city. Equally interesting to learn is how Victor Hugo’s novel THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE-DAME inspired early literary travelers. Like browsing a good library, readers can wander from Franz Kafka’s Prague to Ernest Hemingway’s Key West, Charles Dickens’ London, James Joyce’s Dublin, John Steinbeck’s Monterey, Louisa May Alcott’s Massachusetts and more.

Whether you honor Scotland’s national bard at a Burns Night Supper, battle the windmills that Don Quixote mistook for oppressive giants, or stake out the foggy San Francisco street where Sam Spade’s partner fell victim to a beautiful but deadly dame in THE MALTESE FALCON, your passport to literary adventure begins in the pages of NOVEL DESTINATIONS.

NOVEL DESTINATIONS: Literary Landmarks From Jane Austen's Bath to Ernest Hemingway's Key West © Copyright 2009 by Shannon McKenna Schmidt and Joni Rendon. Reprinted with permission by National Geographic. All rights reserved.

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