Most of us, at various moments in our lives, either adopt a `tourist' identity of are framed within another's tourist experience. Travellers' Tales investigates the future for travelling in a world whose boundaries are shifting and dissolving. The contributors bring together popular and critical discourses of travel to explore questions of identity and politics; history and narration; collecting and representing other cultures. Travellers' tales oscillate between the thrill of novel experiences and unexpected pleasures, and the alienation and loneliness of exile in a strange land. The contributions review recent work on the discourses of tourism, travel and cultural politics; the effects of global interactions and local resistances, and the ways in which records, memorials and signs have all been used to describe the experience of encountering the `other'.

The Traveler's Tale begins in a small village in Turkey where the protagonist, Jefferson Cooper, finds himself (despite himself). He has no idea why he is there, nor who he is. An apparent victim of some sort of selective amnesia, with a suitcase full of money and demonstrably a shady past, he sets out on a voyage of self-discovery. He travels to Istanbul, Mumbai, and Kerala, meeting all manner of people who seem to know him so much better than he knows himself. Along the way, he falls in love with a slender, ethereal person who keeps reappearing just when he seems on the brink of total desperation. It is Miryam who leads him to a realization of who he is and to his long-sought redemption.

Under the dictatorship of Enver Hoxha, all Albanian citizens had their own biografi, a file that was maintained (and often falsified) by the secret police. The information contained in a person's biografi could have devastating effects. When Lloyd Jones visited Albania in 1991, six years after the dictator's death, he heard rumours of a village dentist who, resembling Hoxha in looks and build, had been forced to give up his identity and become the dictator's double. Jones' quest to find Petar Schapallo gives shape not only to an intriguing traveller's tale, but a story about identity-changed, lost or falsified-in a country where identity was strictly controlled.

At twenty-three, William Simon Baekeland was well on his way to becoming the world’s best traveled person. The “billionaire” heir to a great plastics fortune had already visited 163 countries, but his real passion was finding ways to visit the world’s most challenging destinations—war torn cities, disputed territories, and remote or officially off-limits islands at the margins of the map. He earned rock-star status in the world of extreme travel by finding ingenious ways to bring the world’s most widely traveled people to difficult-to-reach and forbidden places. But when his story began to unravel, an eccentric group of hyper-well-traveled country collectors were left wondering how they had allowed their obsession to blind them to the warning signs that William Baekeland wasn’t who they thought he was. Mad Travelers: A Tale of Wanderlust, Greed and the Quest to Reach the Ends of the Earth delves deep inside the subculture of country collecting, taking readers to danger zones like Mogadishu and geographical oddities like Norway’s nearly impossible-to-reach Bouvet Island. Along the way, this raucous tale of adventure and international intrigue illuminates the perils and pleasures of wanderlust while examining a fundamental question: why are some people compelled to travel, while others are content to stay home? Mad Travelers is a perceptive and at times hilarious account of how the pursuit of everywhere put the world’s greatest travelers at the mercy of a brilliant young con man. Soon to be an HBO documentary.

On a freezing night in 1778, General George Washington vanishes. Walking away from the Valley Forge encampment, he takes a fall and is knocked unconscious, only to reappear at a dog park on San Francisco Bay-in the summer of 2014. Washington befriends two Berkeley twenty-somethings who help him cope with the astonishing-and often comical-surprises of the twenty-first century. Washington's absence from Valley Forge, however, is not without serious consequences. As the world rapidly devolves around them-and their beloved Giants fight to salvage a disappointing season-George, Tim, and Matt are catapulted on a race across America to find a way to get George back to 1778. Equal parts time travel tale, thriller, and baseball saga, Finding George Washington is a gripping, humorous, and entertaining look at what happens when past and present collide in the 9th inning, with the bases loaded and no one warming up in the bullpen.