This fifth volume of ASNEL Papers covers a wide range of theoretical and thematic approaches to the topics of travelling, migration, and dislocation. All migrants are travellers, but not all travellers are migrants. Migration and the figure of the migrant have become key concepts in recent post-colonial studies. However, migration is not such a new or exceptional phenomenon. From the eighteenth century onward there have been migrations from Europe to what are now called 'post-colonial' countries, and this prepared the ground for movement back to the old but also to the new centres of Europe and elsewhere. Travel and travel experience, on the other hand, have been part of the cultural codes not only of the West and not only of imperialism. The essays in this volume look at both kinds of movement, at their intersections, and at their (dis)locating effects. They cover a wide range of topics, from early seventeenth-century travel reports, through nineteenth-century women's travel writing, to such contemporary writers as Michael Ondaatje and Janette Turner Hospital.

This is a guide to the new wave of "transit villages", communities that hug metropolitan rail systems in order to reduce "gridlock" and expedite growth. It shows how this new approach to urban development encourages community development, and includes case

Stories are not enough, even though they are essential. And books about history, books of psychology--the best of them take us closer, but still not close enough. Maria Tumarkin's Axiomatic is a boundary-shifting fusion of thinking, storytelling, reportage and meditation. It takes as its starting point five axioms: 'Time Heals All Wounds'; 'History Repeats Itself'; 'Those Who Forget the Past are Condemned to Repeat It'; 'Give Me a Child Before the Age of Seven and I Will Show You the Woman'; and 'You Can't Enter The Same River Twice.' These beliefs--or intuitions--about the role the past plays in our present are often evoked as if they are timeless and self-evident truths. It is precisely because they are neither, yet still we are persuaded by them, that they tell us a great deal about the forces that shape our culture and the way we live.

National Bestseller • A Finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize • A Finalist for the Goldsmiths Prize • Longlisted for the International DUBLIN Literary Award • One of Time Magazine's Top 10 Fiction Books of the Year A New York Times Book Review Notable Book • Named a Best Book of the Year by Time, The Guardian, BOMB Magazine, San Francisco Chronicle, Commonweal, Southern Living, NOW Magazine, The Washington Independent Review of Books, Book Depository, The Globe and Mail, and The National Post (Canada) The stunning second novel of a trilogy that began with Outline, one of The New York Times Book Review’s ten best books of 2015 In the wake of her family’s collapse, a writer and her two young sons move to London. The process of this upheaval is the catalyst for a number of transitions—personal, moral, artistic, and practical—as she endeavors to construct a new reality for herself and her children. In the city, she is made to confront aspects of living that she has, until now, avoided, and to consider questions of vulnerability and power, death and renewal, in what becomes her struggle to reattach herself to, and believe in, life. Filtered through the impersonal gaze of its keenly intelligent protagonist, Transit sees Rachel Cusk delve deeper into the themes first raised in her critically acclaimed novel Outline and offers up a penetrating and moving reflection on childhood and fate, the value of suffering, the moral problems of personal responsibility, and the mystery of change. In this second book of a precise, short, yet epic cycle, Cusk describes the most elemental experiences, the liminal qualities of life. She captures with unsettling restraint and honesty the longing to both inhabit and flee one’s life, and the wrenching ambivalence animating our desire to feel real.

The award-winning, New York Times bestselling literary masterpiece of Shirley Hazzard—the story of two beautiful orphan sisters whose fates are as moving and wonderful, and yet as predestined, as the transits of the planets themselves A Penguin Classic Considered "one of the great English-language novels of the twentieth century" (The Paris Review), The Transit of Venus follows Caroline and Grace Bell as they leave Australia to begin a new life in post-war England. From Sydney to London, New York, and Stockholm, and from the 1950s to the 1980s, the two sisters experience seduction and abandonment, marriage and widowhood, love and betrayal. With exquisite, breathtaking prose, Australian novelist Shirley Hazzard tells the story of the displacements and absurdities of modern life. The result is at once an intricately plotted Greek tragedy, a sweeping family saga, and a desperate love story.

Seghers wrote Transit while living in exile, fleeing her Nazi persecutors. The novel captures the moods and motives of refugees from Hitler's Germany attempting to leave France via the seaport of Marseilles between the French capitulation in 1940 and the Spring of 1941. The story is told from the perspective of an unnamed narrator, a German engine-fitter who has escaped from a Nazi concentration camp (in fact, for the second time) and fled to Paris. Here he encounters a fellow escapee who asks him to deliver papers to a German writer called Weidel. The narrator finds Weidel already dead and assumes his identity, hoping to make use of his visa for Mexico. When he reaches Marseilles to avoid recapture he adds the papers of another deceased German, one Seidler, so from this point onwards he is juggling with three separate identities: those of Weidel, Seidler, and his own.