Focusing on architecture, art and design, each of Phaidon's Wallpaper City Guides is illustrated with more than 50 color photographs and protected by Pantone covers. These pocket-sized travel bibles point you toward a city's hippest nightlife, buzziest hotels, coolest retail, most influential art galleries and cultural spaces, and the best in local design and contemporary architecture. More than 100 destinations are available, from Atlanta to Zurich. Ten volumes are also available in French.

Also distributed for iPhone and iPad, Wallpaper City Guides apps are more portable and interactive than the book versions, with extra features such as photo galleries and in-app web browsing. Tap the screen to call a restaurant to book a table, locate it on our map, and use GPS to discover where to go for a drink nearby.

Why the publisher would bother to print the books in French but neglect to make the apps available for Android is not explained.

Wallpaper City Guides are available in many book and travel stores, from Phaidon and at Amazon.

The Himalayas, the forbidding 1,800-mile mountain range that divides the Indian subcontinent from Asia, have held a particular fascination for westerners. Not only are these barren giants physically treacherous, but the ancient civilizations they sheltered are especially alien to our own. Despite the intrusion of pilgrims and traders from the West, details of the social functioning of the dozens of tiny kingdoms there went largely unrecorded for centuries. As late as the end of the 19th Century, maps of the Himalayas still showed such large geographic areas as Tibet, Nepal, Sikkim and Bhutan as "unexplored."

Of all the people of the Himalayas, the most mysterious and thus most fascinating were the Tibetans. Except for a brief invasion by the British in 1904, Tibet remained shrouded in a thick veil of mystery.* Partly this was a matter of the physical remoteness of the plateau, but also it reflected a determination on the part of the Tibetans to remain aloof and apart. At any event, in "Seven Years in Tibet" we have one of the few in-depth accounts through western eyes of traditional Tibetan life.

Heinrich Harrer

In 1943, Heinrich Harrer, an Austrian mountaineer, sportsman, geographer, and author, escaped with a companion from a British POW camp in the foot hills of the Himalayas. Two years later, they reached Lhasa, Tibet's capitol. Within a relatively short time, Harrer had risen from almost illegal status as an alien pauper to the position of tutor to the Dalai Lama, the political and spiritual leader of the country. In 1952, the Chinese invasion forced him to leave Tibet. "Seven Years in Tibet" is a rousing tale of adventure as well as an intimate journal of daily life in a social environment that has been lost forever. Because of the nature of Harrer's journey and because he is a very courageous but in other ways ordinary person, "Seven Years in Tibet" is unlike any other travel book you've read.

"Stones of Silence: Journeys in the Himalaya" is an adventure story of a different kind. It is the account by George Schaller, one of the world's foremost animal biologists, of his study of Himalayan

Bharal, or blue sheep

sheep and goats over the better part of a six-year period. These animals, known by such unfamiliar names as markhor, tahr, urial, argali and bharal, had been little studied before Schaller, who hoped to answer such fundamental scientific questions as whether the bharal was in fact a goat or a sheep. The biology of sheep and goats may seem a trifle esoteric, but Schaller in one of those rare scientists who can write absorbingly for the layman. Like Harrer, the scientist is attempting to preserve something in danger of being lost, and his passion for his subject informs every page. Neither book should be missed by anyone who enjoys armchair adventures.

If you go, as they say in newspaper travel sections, be sure to take Hugh Swift's "The Trekker's Guide to the Himalayas and Karakoram," still the only guidebook to the entire mountain system, including the hill regions of Pakistan (Chitral, the Gilgit River Valleys, and Baltistan); India (Kashmir, Ladakh, Himachal Pradesh, Garhwal, and Sikkim); all of Nepal; and parts of Bhutan (although more recent books such as Lonely Planet Trekking in the Nepal Himalaya (Travel Guide) explore parts of the area). Included in Swift's book are chapters on the history, cultures and natural history of the region, 22 maps, glossaries to seven Himalayan languages, and lots of advice for the would-be trekker.

All three volumes are illustrated with photographs or line drawings. (1982)

Seven Years in Tibet by Heinrich Harrer
Stones of Silence: Journeys in the Himalaya by George B. Schaller
The Trekker's Guide to the Himalaya and Karakoram by Hugh Swift

*An earlier report, Western Himalaya and Tibet: A Narrative of a Journey Through the Mountains of Northern India During the Years 1847-8 by Thomas Thomson, first published in 1852, was recently restored to print. The explorer and naturalist, on a perilous eighteen-month journey to define the boundary between Kashmir and Chinese Tibet, made valuable contributions to the geography, geology and botany of the western Himalayas.

Source: This Is Colossal

Fiction on Twitter: From short short story to endless stream

It is said that Ernest Hemingway once bet that he could write a complete short story in six words. He was Twitter-ready a half century before anyone conceived of tweeting.

Last week Twitter announced that at the end of November the company will host a five-day Twitter Fiction Festival (#twitterfiction), “a virtual storytelling celebration held entirely on Twitter,” inviting creative experiments in storytelling from authors around the world.

According to Twitter, it has hosted great experiments in fiction already, from Jennifer Egan’s “Black Box” to Teju Cole’s “Small Fates” to Dan Sinker’s @mayoremanuel. And Twitter notes it has even inspired some literary criticism.

To get into the spirit of things, and without getting into the whole business of streaming and interaction as components of twitter-fiction (working within the limitations of the classic tweet, you could say), I came up with this tweet-length short short story:

On the desiccated, recalescent planet, barren at last, the desolated creature, a cockroach, grief-maddened, devoured the corpse of its mate.

Hemingway won the bet, by the way. As the story goes (and the anecdote itself may be fiction), he scribbled “For sale: baby shoes, never used” to take home the pot.

On your virtual travels, don’t fail to visit the site of New York-based photographer and fellow traveler Malcolm Kirk. Galleries on the site focus on Iconic Figures — revealing studies of prominent figures in the arts and sciences, from Marcel Duchamp and Saul Steinberg to Richard Feynman and Arthur C. Clarke, including the famous portrait of Andy Warhol that the iconic and ironic artist turned into a series of silk-screened ‘self-portraits’ that hang in major museums throughout the world; Man As Art — a record of tribal body decoration in Papua New Guinea that was published in a large-format hardcover book documenting islanders’ visually stunning tribal body decorations, headgear and carved masks; Silent Spaces — a documentation of aisled barns dating back to the 12th century; and Enclosed Gardens — a pictorial essay covering some of the world’s most magnificent gardens, self-assigned projects that each involved years of research.

Books by Malcom Kirk:
Silent Spaces: The Last of the Great Aisled Barns (Bullfinch Press 1994)
Man As Art (Chronicle 1993)

We read on buses (and trains and planes and subways*), so Bogotá is taking the logical next step in putting books where we use them.

* The Underground New York Public Library is a virtual gallery featuring the reading-riders of the NYC subways. The New York Public Library, the real one not the virtual one, maintains its smallest branch in the Metropolitan Transit Authority located down a flight of stairs, just outside the turnstile entrance to the No. 6 train on the northwest corner of Lexington Avenue and 50th Street.

UPDATE: There’s an addendum to a 2010 posting about the book exchanges that you find at Starbucks in various parts of the world, although not, apparently, in Southern California: Roadside Assistance: Call the Starbooks — Starbucks book exchanges (The Detourist 2010-06-10).

Brian Fawcett‘s angry, bracing Cambodia: A Book For People Who Find Television Too Slow: a daring act of intellectual guerrilla warfare.

A poet by trade (see, A Poetry War in Prince George 2012/04), Brian Fawcett has a side job deconstructing modern civilization in a stunning series of fiction and non-fiction books and stories (his Virtual Clearcut: Or, the Way Things Are in My Hometown won the 2003 Writer’s Trust prize for Canadian non-fiction). Cambodia, a volume that uses thirteen riotous, edgy, mildly experimental works deploring the mind-destroying impact of consumerist culture and sensationalist mass media to annotate a powerful denunciation of the agonies, extraordinary even measured against the exalted standards of 20th century atrocities, endured three decades ago by Cambodia’s people at the hands of its murderous Khmer Rouge overlords.

The book’s awkward layout — short pieces run across the top of its pages, the long essay along the bottom quarter its entire length — contribute to its subversive appeal. I can’t imagine what section of the bookstore you’ll find Cambodia: it’s at once an incendiary indictment contemporary society, a dissertation on the role of the fiction-writer — the artist — in the late modern era, and a thoughtful, passionate, well-informed and provocative meditation on the lasting poison of imperialism.

What it is not, strictly speaking, is a travel book, although it does capture the faith in human interconnectedness that animates so many of us to caravan to other cultures and places.

Habitual travelers, it seems to me, are frequently driven to explore other societies as a reaction to, almost as a kind of protest against the accelerating homogenization and debasement of their own. It wasn’t so long ago that you wouldn’t have needed to travel much beyond the other side of the next hill to encounter an alien world. Now mass media is forging a universal culture whose shallowness — language coarsened, simplified; bland, anything-goes-as-long-as-no-one-is-truly-offended aesthetics; wealth and power exalted, the cloak of powerlessness meekly donned; dehumanizing indifference to violence and suffering; feeling and “faith” triumphant over fact, seance before science, history reconstituted as subjective fiction; critical thinking feared and rejected; memory and imagination annihilated — causes Brian Fawcett to worry that, on a planet where “Cambodia is as near as your television set,” we risk the loss of “our right to remember our pasts and envision new futures.”

Cambodia: A Book for People Who Find Television Too Slow (Collier 1986) by Brian Fawcett is available at Amazon and other booksellers.

A nice break for detourists: sign up for Library of America‘s free story of the week and have it sent to your e-reader. Perfect airport reading. Free.

Hearing the news that Moat Brae, a Georgian townhouse in Scotland that sparked JM Barrie to create Peter Pan, is to be turned into a center for children’s literature got Emily Temple thinking about all the real-life places that have animated works of literature.


Not big cities that figure in thousands of books, like New York and London and their numerous incitements, but “houses and moors, caves and farmlands hidden away in authors’ hometowns or childhood vacation spots.” So she compiled a list of ten real life places that inspired the likes of Charles Dickens, Herman Melville, Emily Brontë, J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Mark Twain, Robert Frost and F.Scott Fitzgerald to create literary classics.

The rest of the story: 10 Real-Life Places That Inspired Literary Classics by Emily Temple (Flavorwire 2011-08-06).

As an aside: it would be fun, wouldn’t it, to plan a summer trip to Durham, Maine (the inspiration for Salem’s Lot) and to locales such as the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado (The Shining‘s Overlook Hotel), around Stephen King Country: The Illustrated Guide to the Sites and Sights That Inspired the Modern Master of Horror by George W. Beahm. Available from Amazon