Academia.edu no longer supports Internet Explorer.

To browse Academia.edu and the wider internet faster and more securely, please take a few seconds to  upgrade your browser .

Enter the email address you signed up with and we'll email you a reset link.

  • We're Hiring!
  • Help Center

paper cover thumbnail

Travel Writing; A critical study of William Dalrymple's " In Xanadu; A Quest "

Profile image of Sana Nisar

interpretive study of the travel book "in Xanadu; A Quest" to undermine the purpose of travel writing and clash of Eastern/Western civilizations projected in the text.

Related Papers

David Gibbons

The work of William Dalrymple reflects a series of transformations, from straightforward travel writing, through more complex and profound encounters with the places and people of various Eastern nations, in particular India, to what most recently might best be described as narrative history. While such depth would be out of place in tourist discourse, some of it – the historical dimension in particular – is unusual even for travel writing. Despite the increasing specialization, however, Dalrymple’s approach has if anything become less elitist in nature; he has even been known to offer his services providing guest lectures on Indian history to select tour parties. His choice of history as his preferred method of representation in theory allows his chosen cultures to represent themselves. In practice, however, it tends to result in a reduced emphasis on the other, and the figure of the first-person narrator, ostensibly relegated to the background, proves to be more resilient than anticipated. Possibly the main theme of Dalrymple’s work as a whole is his own cultural development, from callow travel writer to culturally sensitive historical commentator.

travel writer xanadu

Laurence Raw

This book/ thesis was written by Kamil Aydin of Ataturk University. I published the book on behalf of the British Council during 1999.

SMART M O V E S J O U R N A L IJELLH

The city’s expatriate population has been steadily on the rise in India. There are several narratives that are born out of foreign presence in global cities, and Delhi is no different. While we derive a sense of expatriate life and times in Delhi cumulatively from a clutch of sources like forums of shared experience and information and blogs, interviews, articles, and reports etc., expatriates in Delhi have also found the urge and the ethos to write longer narratives. This paper examines some of the best known examples of expatriate novels located in Delhi with the objective of placing Delhi on the map of important urban-global narrative trajectories traced by the expatriate novel. The above inquiry suggests that Delhi is an important world capital on crisscrossing loci of rapid and incessant global flux. It has dazed and enticed the global jet-setters in equal measures. The expatriate’s gaze is the Lacanian gaze where the gazed object does not remain mute or inanimate but speaks back to the gazer in a reciprocal relationship. As the expatriate feels objectified and marooned in an alien city, she also gazes back at the city as a resistive tool to manage her objectified otherness. It is a rewarding project to study the Delhi based expatriate writing of William Dalrymple, Sam Miller, Dave Prager, Rana Dasgupta and Raza Rumi as it is rich with voices, strategies, issues and images that are resonant and iridescent with meaning for not only expatriates and transnationals but also for every resident, settler, writer and thinker associated with Delhi

Jason Freewalt

The travels of Venetian merchant Marco Polo (lived 1254-1324, traveled 1271-1293) captivated readers when his book was published c. 1300. At the time, most Europeans traveled very little, so Polo’s descriptions of Armenia, Baghdad, Tabriz, Persia, Kashmir, the Desert of Lop, Karakoram, and Shangdu (Xanadu) tantalized his audience. Over seven hundred years later, Marco Polo’s tale remains exciting for would-be adventurers and instructive for historians and other scholars. Polo’s travels brought him into contact with various cultures that make up what we refer to today as the Middle East. In addition, he traveled eastward beyond the Middle East into India and China, lands anciently connected to the West by the Silk Road, yet still mysterious to most Westerners. Polo was but one of many medieval European travelers, yet certainly the most famous, to venture through what we now consider the Middle East to the Far East during the thirteenth century, helping to create an important cultural connection between the West and the East, with the Middle East as the bridge.

Discusses the widening circumference of global interactions with Central Asia from antiquity to the late 20th century by means of travel writings. Multilingual coverage, with equal attention to Asian and Middle Eastern as well as European and eventually American travel accounts of Central Asia.

Yehoshua Frenkel

Talip Tarık Dağlar

HistoricalAtlasOfTheIslamicWorld

early ottoman period in bilad al-sham and Arab travelers accounts of the new political reality

The `Book' of Travels: Genre, Ethnology, and Pilgrimage, 1250-1700 (Studies in Medieval and Reformation Traditions), edited by Palmira Brummett

Joan-Pau Rubiés

Romano - Arabica , Laura Sitaru , George Grigore

Geographies of Arab and Muslim Identity through the Eyes of Travelers

RELATED PAPERS

thierry zarcone

Malise H Ruthven

Ümit Fırat Açıkgöz

Daniel Waugh

Mark Dickens

International Journal of English Language and Translation Studies

Mustafa Serdar Palabıyık

Turkish Area Studies Review Bulletin of the British Association for Turkish Area Studies

Gönül Pultar

Lauren Sappington Taranu

Zaza Anchabadze

Sonja Brentjes

The Fascination of Persia. The Persian-European Dialogue in Seventeenth-Century Art & Contemporary Art of Tehran

Rudolph (Rudi) Matthee

Alexia Lagast

East Asian History 39 (2014)

Stephen G. Haw

Amel El-Rayis

Stephane Dudoignon

Mostafa Almathany

Nikolaus Egel

Maurits Van Den Boogert

Kathryn Medill

jaki jeremi

Cristina Trivulzio di Belgiojoso. An Italian Princess in the 19th c. Turkish Countryside

Maria Pia Pedani

James M. Dorsey

serena di nepi

Muhammad Nabeel Musharraf

deniz tansi

Michele Lamprakos

PASSAGE, Friends of Museums (FOM) Magazine

Pallavi Narayan

Dalmatia and the Mediterranean: Portable Archaeology and the Poetics of Influence, ed. Alina Payne

Gülru Necipoğlu

Alexandre Papas

Quest Issues in Contemporary Jewish History

Jewish Quarterly Review

Martin Jacobs

The Medieval History Journal 4(1)

Maurizio Peleggi

RELATED TOPICS

  •   We're Hiring!
  •   Help Center
  • Find new research papers in:
  • Health Sciences
  • Earth Sciences
  • Cognitive Science
  • Mathematics
  • Computer Science
  • Academia ©2024

Authors & Events

Recommendations

Best Audiobooks for Road Trips

  • New & Noteworthy
  • Bestsellers
  • Popular Series
  • The Must-Read Books of 2023
  • Popular Books in Spanish
  • Coming Soon
  • Literary Fiction
  • Mystery & Thriller
  • Science Fiction
  • Spanish Language Fiction
  • Biographies & Memoirs
  • Spanish Language Nonfiction
  • Dark Star Trilogy
  • Ramses the Damned
  • Penguin Classics
  • Award Winners
  • The Parenting Book Guide
  • Books to Read Before Bed
  • Books for Middle Graders
  • Trending Series
  • Magic Tree House
  • The Last Kids on Earth
  • Planet Omar
  • Beloved Characters
  • The World of Eric Carle
  • Llama Llama
  • Junie B. Jones
  • Peter Rabbit
  • Board Books
  • Picture Books
  • Guided Reading Levels
  • Middle Grade
  • Activity Books
  • Trending This Week
  • Top Must-Read Romances
  • Page-Turning Series To Start Now
  • Books to Cope With Anxiety
  • Short Reads
  • Anti-Racist Resources
  • Staff Picks
  • Memoir & Fiction
  • Features & Interviews
  • Emma Brodie Interview
  • James Ellroy Interview
  • Nicola Yoon Interview
  • Qian Julie Wang Interview
  • Deepak Chopra Essay
  • How Can I Get Published?
  • For Book Clubs
  • Reese's Book Club
  • Oprah’s Book Club
  • happy place " data-category="popular" data-location="header">Guide: Happy Place
  • the last white man " data-category="popular" data-location="header">Guide: The Last White Man
  • Authors & Events >
  • Our Authors
  • Michelle Obama
  • Zadie Smith
  • Emily Henry
  • Amor Towles
  • Colson Whitehead
  • In Their Own Words
  • Qian Julie Wang
  • Patrick Radden Keefe
  • Phoebe Robinson
  • Emma Brodie
  • Ta-Nehisi Coates
  • Laura Hankin
  • Recommendations >
  • 21 Books To Help You Learn Something New
  • The Books That Inspired "Saltburn"
  • Insightful Therapy Books To Read This Year
  • Historical Fiction With Female Protagonists
  • Best Thrillers of All Time
  • Manga and Graphic Novels
  • happy place " data-category="recommendations" data-location="header">Start Reading Happy Place
  • How to Make Reading a Habit with James Clear
  • Why Reading Is Good for Your Health
  • Vallery Lomas’ Blueberry Buckle Recipe
  • New Releases
  • Memoirs Read by the Author
  • Our Most Soothing Narrators
  • Press Play for Inspiration
  • Audiobooks You Just Can't Pause
  • Listen With the Whole Family

Penguin Random House

By William Dalrymple

Category: travel: asia | asian world history | travel writing.

Sep 18, 2012 | ISBN 9780307948885 | 5-3/16 x 8 --> | ISBN 9780307948885 --> Buy

Sep 18, 2012 | ISBN 9780307948915 | ISBN 9780307948915 --> Buy

Buy from Other Retailers:

In Xanadu by William Dalrymple

Sep 18, 2012 | ISBN 9780307948885

Sep 18, 2012 | ISBN 9780307948915

Buy the Ebook:

  • Barnes & Noble
  • Books A Million
  • Google Play Store

About In Xanadu

William Dalrymple’s award-winning first book: his classic, fiercely intelligent and wonderfully entertaining account of his journey across Marco Polo’s 700-year-old route from Jerusalem to Xanadu, the summer palace of Kubla Khan.    At the age of twenty-two, Dalrymple left his college in Cambridge to travel to the ruins of Kubla Khan’s stately pleasure dome in Xanadu. As he and his companions travel across the width of Asia—crossing through Acre, Aleppo, Tabriz, Tashkurgan, and other mysterious and sometimes hellish places—they encounter dusty, forgotten roads, unexpected hospitality, and difficult challenges. Stylish, witty, and knowledgeable about everything from the dreaded order of Assassins to the hidden origins of the Three Magi, this is travel writing at its best.

Also by William Dalrymple

Return of a King

About William Dalrymple

WILLIAM DALRYMPLE is an award-winning British historian and writer based in Delhi, India, as well as a BAFTA-award-winning broadcaster and critic. His books have won the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize, the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award, the Sunday Times Young… More about William Dalrymple

Product Details

You may also like.

Book cover

Street of Eternal Happiness

Book cover

India: A Million Mutinies Now

Book cover

Confucius Lives Next Door

Book cover

The Idealist

Book cover

Women of the Pleasure Quarters

Book cover

Thoughts from the Ice-Drinker’s Studio

Book cover

BULLS IN THE CHINA SHOP

Book cover

The Lady and the Monk

“Superb. . . . Marvelous. . . . Rich with the sights, smells, history and feel of Asia. . . . A classic.” – The Sunday Express “Splendid. . . . Dalrymple is plainly brilliant, bonkers, or both.” — The Times (London) “The future of travel writing lies in the hands of gifted writers like Dalrymple.” — The Independent (London)   “This is travel writing in the grand tradition, with a true whiff of high adventure. Dalrymple recounts his saga with a fine mixture of humour and erudition, and with the exuberance of youth.” — Evening Standard “Bright, sharp, laconic and outrageous, his is an adventurous account of hippies and mad mullahs, mosques and sacred tombs, dangers and celebrations, Dionysian rituals and rich discoveries. It is full of life and very funny.” — Sunday Times   “Dalrymple is probably the best travel writer of his generation.” — The Daily Mail   “Uncommonly satisfying because of the rare skill with which Dalrymple blends his ingredients: history, danger, humour, architecture, people, hardships, politics.” — London Literary Review   “Brilliant.” — The Spectator   “Dalrymple is a phenomenon and his journey a remarkable one. . . . A striking achievement.” —Punch   “A vivid, engaging, often hilarious account of an amazing 12,000-mile quest.” — The Sunday Express   “Outstanding. . . . William Dalrymple is a natural writer. His models are, perhaps, Peter Fleming and Evelyn Waugh rather than more serious travellers, but he’s a better scholar than either. Best of all, he has the gift of comedy. . . . In Xanadu marks the arrival of a new star.” — Sydney Morning Herald   “A fast, furious, funny read. . . . Clearly the stuff bestsellers are made of.” — Times of India   “A delightful book—erudite, adventurous and amusing [with] an exotic itinerary, charming companions, impossible odds, appalling discomfort and bizarre encounters along the way.” —Piers Paul Reed

Visit other sites in the Penguin Random House Network

Raise kids who love to read

Today's Top Books

Want to know what people are actually reading right now?

An online magazine for today’s home cook

Just for joining you’ll get personalized recommendations on your dashboard daily and features only for members.

At the age of twenty-two, William Dalrymple left his college in Cambridge to travel to the ruins of Kublai Khan’s stately pleasure dome in Xanadu. This is an account of a quest which took him and his companions across the width of Asia, along dusty, forgotten roads, through villages and cities full of unexpected hospitality and wildly improbable escapades, to Coleridge’s Xanadu itself. At once funny and knowledgeable, In Xanadu is in the finest tradition of British travel writing. Told with an exhilarating blend of eloquence, wit, poetry and delight, it is already established as a classic of its kind.

In Xanadu Cover

Reviews and Quotes

The Best Travel Literature of All Time

Like many travellers, you may have found yourself immersed in the voyages of those who have gone before you from time to time. While living vicariously is no replacement for being on the road, there are some utterly wonderful nonfiction travel books out there, which are the next best thing.

travel writer xanadu

A Time of Gifts by Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor (Photo: Paul Stafford for TravelMag.com)

It’s quite genuinely impossible to create a comprehensive list of the best travel literature. While there’s a lot of replication of these types of lists out there, some books endure precisely because of their importance at the time or to other writers. Although some authors listed below deserve to have more than one of their books featured on this compendium of the greatest travel literature, only their finest work has been included. Consider it your gateway to that writer’s greater oeuvre, if you’ve not read any of their work previously; a reminder if you have. Similarly, non-male writers have often been unfortunately overlooked in the past and some real gems that deserve to be on the best travel literature of all-time lists have been overlooked.

The following aims to redress the balance a little. Consideration is also given to some of the works that defined people who are now better-known for their other exploits, because there’s no greater adventure than that of somebody whose travels inspired them to do something more important or lasting in the world beyond merely moving through space and time for travel’s sake. Here are twenty of the best pieces of travel literature ever written (theoretically), to guide you to your next read, to find inspiration for your next trip, or to simply use as a general reading checklist until your next journey.

A Time of Gifts (1977) – Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor

Writing about Paddy Leigh Fermor in 2020, it would be easy to dismiss the great writer as a privileged individual who was fortunate to stay with royalty and the well-to-do all across Europe as he sauntered from one place to the next. But that would be an awful disservice. A Time of Gifts is the first of a trilogy of books documenting his journey, on foot, from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople (Istanbul). His scholarship and complete immersion in every culture he encountered helped his writing transcend mere travel literature to reach a higher level of writing. You never feel as though he’s an outside observer trying to make sense of the foreign by superimposing his own beliefs. His prose has been described as baroque, and is densely layered with a deep intelligence, understanding and, above all, passion for everything he encounters. The trip itself was undertaken in 1933/4 and the Europe that Fermor uncovers on his peregrinations is one which is beginning to spiral blindly into major conflict. Somehow this aspect makes the random acts of kindness he experiences across Germany and the rest of the continent even more bittersweet.

Publisher: John Murray, Buy at Amazon.com

Arabian Sands (1959) – Sir Wilfred Thesiger

travel writer xanadu

Arabian Sands by Wilfred Thesiger (Photo: courtesy of P.S. Burton via Wikimedia Commons)

Another travel literature classic is Thesiger’s intrepid anthropological look at Bedouin culture and lifestyle in one of the remotest, most inhospitable places on earth: the Arabian Peninsula’s Rub’ al Khali. The setting for the journey is amid the embers of World War II, the repercussions of which were being felt worldwide, including among the Bedouin tribes who’d lived much in the same way they always had until the outside world intruded. In effect, this book offers a snapshot of a remarkable culture that was fast altering, which is what makes this, and many of the books written during the reign of the British Empire, fascinating historical documents. For all of the rightful condemnation of European colonialism, one thing is clear in this book: the fascination and inquisitive nature of the many British scholarly individuals sent to far-reaching corners of the globe created an immensely valuable cache of first-person accounts of cultures and peoples that may not have been recorded otherwise amid the inevitable and inescapable rise of globalisation of the time.

Publisher: Penguin Classics, Buy at Amazon.com

Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1942) – Rebecca West

West’s voluminous, in-depth examination of Yugoslavia during her time travelling there in 1937 was designed to explore how the country was a reflection of its past. West spent six weeks journeying across the whole region with her husband and meeting eminent citizens along the way. Sadly, by the time the book was published, the Nazis had invaded and the country would never be the same again, which makes this yet another invaluable early-20 th -century document. What sets Black Lamb and Grey Falcon apart though is the level of exquisite detail and research dedicated to the subject. If there was any proof required that travel literature serves an invaluable purpose as a piece of primary historical evidence, then this may well be it.

Publisher: Canongate Books, Buy at Amazon.com

travel writer xanadu

Black Lamb and Grey Falcon by Rebecca West (Photo: Paul Stafford for TravelMag.com)

Border (2017) – Kapka Kassabova

Beautifully written and layered with a real sense of atmosphere, Kassabova’s haunting Border is one of the standout pieces of travel writing to be published in the last decade. Eastern Europe is one of the least explored regions of the world in travel literature. Owing perhaps in part to the secrecy and legacy of distrust brought about by the Cold War, even those who have travelled through as part of longer journeys (Paul Theroux in Pillars of Hercules or Bill Bryson in Neither Here Nor There ) scarcely shed any real light on the region. Here, Kassabova heads back to the nation of her birth (Bulgaria) to explore the fragments of political ideology, faith and race, and the blurred lines between them, that have developed around the border region separating Bulgaria from Greece and Turkey.

Publisher: Granta Books, Buy at Amazon.com

travel writer xanadu

Border by Kapka Kasabova (Photo: Paul Stafford for TravelMag.com)

Down and Out in Paris and London (1933) – George Orwell

While much of travel literature is concerned with the voyage and seeking out the miraculous, the unique and the lesser known, Orwell took another route entirely. Down and Out in Paris and London does exactly what it says on the tin. It is a memoir of impoverished living in two of the world’s great cities, at a time when they were global beacons in terms of both power and culture. Not only does this book, in a very prescient move, eschew the superior tone of academia when examining the other, it also avoids all glamour in those cities, focussing entirely on the poor, the meek and the desperate. In Paris he lives on the edge of eviction, working the kitchens of a fancy establishment, while in London he lives the life of a tramp, moving from one bunkhouse and soup kitchen to the next, living day to day. It is to travel writing what the ‘method’ is to acting.

travel writer xanadu

Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell (Photo: Paul Stafford for TravelMag.com)

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1972) – Hunter S. Thompson

The outlier on this list (all good lists need one) is Hunter S. Thompson’s delightfully absurd, occasionally apocryphal and downright debauched novel Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas . In it, he created a new way of writing known as gonzo journalism, a style of storytelling which is found most commonly today in some documentaries, where the lines of fact and fiction become blurred and with the journalist placed as a central character in the story. This brilliant commentary on the flexible and inconsistent nature of truth was perfectly epitomised by the increasingly hallucinogenic recollections of protagonist Raoul Duke and Dr. Gonzo. The road trip to Las Vegas ultimately casts important light on an American society gripped by racism and violence (partly why the story is still so powerful today is that America hasn’t yet learned to grow up). As such it remains one of the most intriguing snapshots of America out there, surpassing the work of many strait-laced travel narratives in the process.

Publisher: Random House Inc., Buy at Amazon.com

travel writer xanadu

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson (Photo: Mathieu Croisetière via Flickr / CC BY-SA 2.0)

The Great Railway Bazaar: By Train Through Asia (1975) – Paul Theroux

A perfect example of how gonzo journalism began to seep into travel literature comes from what is arguably the most important modern travelogue: The Great Railway Bazaar . In it, Theroux travels from London all the way to Southeast Asia and Japan, via India, then back to Europe via Russia’s Trans-Siberian railway. While Theroux upholds elements of the old school travel narrative – like the scholarly, studious approach and the inquisitive air – his journey by train is as much about the growing backpacker, hippie, trail and the western counterculture that encouraged it. Occasionally the line between fact and fiction is blurred in his writing, but only to better convey his interactions with the people he met. As such, you get a fascinating look at what could be called modern colonialism, whereby the train networks that were often built by colonial rulers in non-European nations across the world, like India and Burma, were now being used by a new generation in the post-colonial era to explore these newly-sovereign nations.

In Patagonia (1977) – Bruce Chatwin

Coming hot on the tail of Theroux’s above book is perhaps the most popular and enduring travel book of all time: In Patagonia . Bruce Chatwin starts it off with a direct nod to writing and journalism’s slide into apocrypha by framing his trip loosely around the search for remains of a “brontosaurus” found in a Patagonian cave, which he first found languishing in his grandparent’s house. The doubtful story behind this find sets him on a road where he aim to unravel various other mysteries whose only connection is geographical, including the final resting place of Butch Cassady and the Sundance Kid, in the wild, empty spaces of South America. It’s a brilliant book formed of loose sections that don’t directly link to one another but has greatly influenced modern travel literature today.

Publisher: Vintage Classics, Buy at Amazon.com

travel writer xanadu

In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin (Photo: Paul Stafford for TravelMag.com)

In Xanadu (1989) – William Dalrymple

One of the travel writers greatly influenced by Chatwin was William Dalrymple, whose own quest for his first book, In Xanadu , was framed as a search for the fabled palace of Kublai Khan, Xanadu. This type of narrative has always proven to be a ready source of inspiration for some of the better modern travel books; searching for answers to popular mysteries. It has a journalistic bent to it, and manages to sidestep the awkwardness of westerners merely travelling abroad and casting aspersions about the people and cultures they encounter through an imperial gaze, as is the criticism often lodged again some of the earlier works of travel writing. Here, Dalrymple follows in the footsteps of Marco Polo (following footsteps of somebody famous is also a common trope of travel literature) to find the palace. While Dalrymple restores elements of the scholarly, learned approach common to writers like Robert Byron and Paddy Leigh Fermor, you can feel the impact of those 70s writers as well.

Publisher: Flamingo, Buy at Amazon.com

travel writer xanadu

In Xanadu by William Dalrymple (Photo: Paul Stafford for TravelMag.com)

Into the Wild (1996) – Jon Krakauer

Few gripping travel narratives manage to capture the why? of our impulse to roam quite like Jon Krakauer does in Into the Wild . The book is both harrowing and revelatory, while performing a third-person character study on a young man he never actually met. In 1992 Chris McCandless walked into the Alaskan wilderness and never came back out. The book tries to examine what had led him there in the first place, whether he’d intended to return at all, and why he wasn’t the first to try and cut all ties with modern society. Krakauer looks to others, such as Henry David Thoreau ( Walden is the original escape from society book and a must-read for anybody fascinated by this subject), who successfully parted from the rat race, as well as the reasons McCandless initially fled from well-to-do family life years before and never contacted them again in his search for something more profound and meaningful. While most readers may disagree with McCandless’s methods, his motives seem far more familiar and relatable.

Publisher: Pan Macmillan, Buy at Amazon.com

The Living Mountain (1977) – Nan Shepherd

Perhaps one of the finest pieces of nature writing ever committed to paper is The Living Mountain by Nan Shepherd. Sadly, it’s also one of the most underrated books. The research for her book was undertaken in and around 1942, during the Second World War, which didn’t trouble the wilds of Scotland too badly. Here, the stark beauty of the Cairngorms seems to mirror the harsh reality of war. But Shepherd’s deep examination of the various microcosms of life that thrive on the region’s mountains is really a poem that exalts life. It’s a celebration of survival and endurance. Her wonderful book almost never made it to print, lying in a drawer for decades until a friend read it and encouraged her to seek out a publisher. We’re lucky it did.

travel writer xanadu

The Living Mountain by Nan Shepherd (Photo: Paul Stafford for TravelMag.com)

The Motorcycle Diaries (1992) – Che Guevara

Even if Che Guevara never became the revolutionary and icon of a generation that he did, The Motorcycle Diaries is a fascinating first-person account of travel’s capacity to broaden the mind. The young medic Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara sets out from his home in Buenos Aires with his friend Alberto Granado sharing a motorcycle ‘La Poderosa’ and in his pointed recollections, you can almost feel Che’s ideological shift. He sees poverty and pain and beauty in the poor communities they visit, and through this, we learn a lot about how Guevara became a key player in the Cuban Revolution. But it’s also a beautiful rumination about the paths we take in life and the importance of curiosity.

Publisher: Perennial, Buy at Amazon.com

Notes from a Small Island (1995) – Bill Bryson

You can’t really write a top travel literature list and omit Bill Bryson. He’s one of the finest travel writers still producing books. Notes from a Small Island is particularly intriguing because, while most of the books that make any top travel literature list tend to be written by Brits, this is a book about Britain, written by an American. And it’s a delightfully observed book at that, pinpointing the eccentricities and unusual aspects of the island nation that most Brits would never think twice about, but when seen through foreign eyes suddenly become absurd. Bryson is especially gifted at making even the most mundane things seem funny. His books neatly balance thorough research and scholarship with humour and keen observation, effectively amalgamating all of the key aspects of travel literature into one inimitable style.

Publisher: Black Swan, Buy at Amazon.com

travel writer xanadu

Notes from a Small Island by Bill Bryson (Photo: Wolf Gang via Flickr / CC BY-SA 2.0)

On the Road (1957) – Jack Kerouac

Before modern travel literature’s more self-aware phase that started in the 1970s, we had what essentially kick-started the great 20 th -century American cultural upheaval: The Beat Movement. Kerouac was writing about sexual promiscuity, wanton drug use and giving the establishment the middle finger way before it was cool to do so. Well-educated and moving in New York’s literary circles, Kerouac’s thinly-veiled characters in On the Road (substituting Old Bull Lee for William S. Burroughs, Dean Moriarty for Neal Cassady, Carlo Marx for Allen Ginsberg, and Sal Paradise for himself) are painted into a quasi-fictional account of his cross-country jaunts in the late 1940s. The post-war world was much-changed; the white picket fence America with its Jim Crow segregation and uptight Bible-belt hypocrisy were no longer acceptable. Around the same time, J.D. Salinger was branding it phoney, while Kerouac was realising this in his own way, by embracing escapism and drugs. On the Road still resonates today; both the book and the Beats gave licence to a generation of youths to question the oppressive system that became all too obvious in the 60s.

travel writer xanadu

On The Road by Jack Kerouac (Photo: Paul Stafford for TravelMag.com)

The Road to Oxiana (1937) – Robert Byron

Much of the Afghanistan and Iran of Byron’s writing has disappeared, making the precision of his prose all the more valuable. The Road to Oxiana has all the classic elements of earlier travel narratives in it, scholarship, keen observation but also the kind of humour and casual presentation that would become far more popular in the writing styles common to the latter half of the 20 th century. Byron’s constant use of Marjoribanks to replace the name of the Persian ruler of the time was designed to evade censure or punishment in case his notebooks were confiscated and read. The humour of this rebelliousness is not lost when read today, even if some of his style may feel a little bit dated now. His architectural descriptions may be among some of the finest in all of travel literature.

travel writer xanadu

The Road to Oxiana by Robert Byron (Photo: Paul Stafford for TravelMag.com)

Rome and a Villa (1952) – Eleanor Clark

Because the majority of travel writing is crafted around a voyage or quest of some sort, we expect the movement to transcend places, countries even. What Clark does exceptionally well in Rome and a Villa is offer an in-depth depiction of just one city: Rome. This book, although not particularly tied to or crafted around any one specific idea, offers a deeper understanding of The Eternal City based on Clark’s explorations, often on foot. Indeed, her scholarly treatment of the Italian capital brings the city’s rich, storied past to life in imaginative and illuminating ways that offer fresh insight on a place that we may easily think has already been well covered already. Which goes to show that places change with the times offering an opportunity for fresh perspectives. There’s nowhere that is dull or too well-known in travel writing if handled by the right scribe.

Publisher: Harper Perennial, Buy at Amazon.com

Shadow of the Silk Road (2007) – Colin Thubron

Colin Thubron’s fascination with worlds that are ostensibly closed off to westerners has often led him into places that many others wouldn’t think to go. He visited China before it had opened up to the world, and the same goes for Soviet Russia. In Shadow of the Silk Road Thubron exhibits why his books are perhaps the most masterfully crafted of all contemporary travel literature. His pacing and descriptive writing are exquisite, particularly in this book, in which he journeys from Xi’an to Antakya in Turkey following the old ways, through Central Asia, once known as the Silk Road. The worlds he uncovers and the people he meets are painstakingly woven into a rich text, much like a hand-woven Persian rug, that is one of the most evocative pieces of travel writing out there.

Publisher: Vintage, Buy at Amazon.com

travel writer xanadu

Shadow of the Silk Road by Colin Thubron (Photo: Paul Stafford for TravelMag.com)

Travels with Myself and Another (1979) – Martha Gellhorn

Even if Martha Gellhorn was writing today, she would rightly be upheld as one of the great journalists, but given that she was doing it decades ago, often better than her counterparts in a male-dominated field, is even more remarkable. The ‘Another’ that accompanies Gellhorn through much of the book was her former husband Ernest Hemingway, but the book also includes memoir from Africa in which she voyages solo. The book is presented as a collection of essays, a format that has become increasingly common in travel writing and which effectively allows the book to focus on more than one topic. Gellhorn’s writing includes keen observation, lively wit and a really sharp political outlook.

Publisher: Eland Publishing Ltd., Buy at Amazon.com

The Valleys of the Assassins (1934) – Freya Stark

Stark was an incredible human being. Fluent in numerous languages, including Farsi, she travelled the world often alone at a time when even men undertaking such journeys were considered intrepid. Stark was particularly drawn to the Middle East and was able to recount the stories of the women there, living in devout Muslim communities, in a way no man would ever have been able to do. She also discovered regions that had not been explored by Westerners before, including the Valley of the Assassins, which forms the basis of this eponymous book, receiving the Royal Geographical Society’s prestigious Back Award in the process. She continued to write books well into her 90s (releasing work over six decades) and died in Italy at the age of 100.

Publisher: Modern Library Inc., Buy at Amazon.com

travel writer xanadu

Wild by Cheryl Strayed (Photo: Paul Stafford for TravelMag.com)

Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail (2012) – Cheryl Strayed

Some may question this popular book’s inclusion on a list of the all-time greats, but it really has all the ingredients of a classic exploration of the human psyche. The physical duress that Strayed experienced on her hike of the Pacific Crest Trail (which runs from California’s border with Mexico to Washington’s border with Canada), and the gradual loss of her toenails as a result, is depicted with visceral precision. Her self-inflicted pain mirrors the mental health and dependency issues that plagued her before embarking on the feat, and in the process, we discover the restorative power of travel, of meeting new people and of forcing ourselves to step beyond our comfortably-positioned boundaries. Like any good travel literature, this book sheds light on why travel is so addictive, powerful and pertinent. Just like all the other books on this list, you’ll finish it wanting to plan your next trip.

Publisher: Atlantic Books, Buy at Amazon.com

Latest Articles

  • Best Laundry Pickup and Delivery Services in Los Angeles March 3, 2024
  • The Best 4-Star Hotels in Downtown Los Angeles March 3, 2024
  • A Comparison of Direct Flights from Dubai to Doha March 1, 2024
  • Where to Find Short Term Office Space Rentals in Miami March 1, 2024
  • 5 of the Best Escape Rooms in Honolulu March 1, 2024
  • Coffee House

In the footsteps of Marco Polo: the journey that changed William Dalrymple’s life

  • 24 June 2015, 12:00am

travel writer xanadu

William Dalrymple

travel writer xanadu

This is the introduction to the 25th anniversary edition of William Dalrymple’s first book,  In Xanadu: A Quest

At the end of the windy, rainy April of 1986, towards the end of my second year at university, I was on my way back to my room one evening, when I happened to trudge past my college notice board.

There my eyes fell on a bright yellow sheet of A4, headlined in capital letters THE GAILLARD LAPSLEY TRAVEL SCHOLARSHIP. It hadn’t been a good week. I was 21: broke, tired of revision for exams and already longing for the holidays. But stopping to look closer, I found that the notice was an announcement concerning a fund that had been established in the memory of some recently-deceased history don; its stated aim was to fund research travel for the college’s mediaeval historians. There were, I knew, barely a handful of mediaevalists in the college.

I walked straight over to the library, found a large quarto edition of The Times Atlas of World History and leafed through the pages to see what was the longest and most ambitious mediaeval journey I could think of following: the longer the trip, I figured, the larger the grant I could apply for.

An hour later I had typed out an application for an expedition to follow the outward journey of my childhood hero, Marco Polo, from Jerusalem to Kubla Khan’s Xanadu in Mongolia. The place names were the stuff of fantasy, and so, I felt sure, was the application. But I happened recently to have seen an article announcing that the Karakorum Highway linking Pakistan to China had just been opened to travellers. This meant that following Polo’s journey was technically feasible for the first time since the Soviet invasion had cut the hippy’s overland route a decade earlier. I posted the application in the letterbox of the don responsible, then went back to my revision and forgot all about it.

Most popular

Kate andrews, is this really the tory party’s election budget.

travel writer xanadu

A month later, I was returning to my rooms from the last of the year-end exams when I found an embossed college envelope had been slipped under my door. Inside was a short letter and a cheque for the princely sum of £700: much the largest cheque anyone had ever written me. To my immense excitement, but also real foreboding, I found I had just committed myself to an enormously long and dangerous journey through a part of the world I was almost entirely ignorant about. To make matters worse, I had just been chucked by the girlfriend with whom I had planned to make the journey.

It was not a promising start; but the expedition which followed remains by far the most exhilarating I have ever undertaken: nothing I have done since, in half a lifetime of intense travel, has ever begun to equal the thrill of that 16,000-mile three month journey, walking, hitchhiking and bussing from one side of Asia the another. It was also a journey that, in a very real sense, changed my life forever.

I had already travelled in India, and the previous summer had hitchhiked from Scotland to Jerusalem following the route of the First Crusade. I read more widely still among the English travel writers, and Eric Newby, Bruce Chatwin, Peter Fleming, Patrick Leigh Fermor and especially Robert Byron were then my literary Gods, at whose altars I worshipped with an almost fundamentalist fervour. Now I was determined to write my own travel book, and from the first morning of the trip, on arrival in Jerusalem, I kept detailed notes with a view to producing a book that I wanted to be an updated homage to Robert Byron’s The Road to Oxiana , a text I loved so much and had read so often, that I knew great chunks of it by heart.

The result was  In Xanadu: A Quest . The book, which was first published quarter of a century ago, in 1989, had a lucky reception. The early 1980’s was a time of disenchantment with the novel, and travel writing seemed to present a serious alternative to fiction. A writer could still use the techniques of the novel – to develop characters, select and tailor experience into a series of scenes and set pieces, arrange the action so as to give the narrative shape and momentum – yet what was being written about was true. Moreover, unlike most literary fiction, travel writing sold.

The success of Paul Theroux’s The Great Railway Bazaar , with its sales of 1.5m copies, had dramatically breathed life into the sort of travel memoir that had flourished in an earlier age, but which had languished since the European empires imploded after the Second World War. Its success inspired Bruce Chatwin to give up his job as a journalist and to go off to South America. The result – In Patagonia – was published in 1977, the same year Leigh Fermor produced A Time of Gifts . The final breakthrough came in 1984 with the publication of the celebrated travel writing issue of Granta : ‘Travel writing is undergoing a revival,’ wrote Bill Buford, the magazine’s editor, ‘evident not only in the busy reprinting of the travel classics, but in the staggering number of new travel writers emerging. Not since the 1930s has travel writing been so popular or so important.

So In Xanadu came out at just the right moment, when travel writing was at its most popular. Partly as a result of this lucky timing, the book got generous reviews, was an immediate bestseller and won a small clutch of prizes. It allowed me for the first time to think of writing as a feasible career. It nonetheless remains a text I have always felt deeply ambiguous about.

For In Xanadu records the impressions, prejudices and enthusiasms of a very young, naïve and deeply Anglocentric undergraduate. Indeed my 21 year old self – bumptious, cocky and self-confident, quick to judge and embarrassingly slow to hesitate before stereotyping entire nations – is a person I now feel mildly disapproving of: like some smugly self-important but charming nephew who you can’t quite disown, but feel like giving a good tight slap to, or at least cutting down to size, for his own good.

And yet this book brings back so very many happy memories. It retains, bottles and distills all the good humour, cheerfulness and joie de vivre of one of the very happiest periods of my life, a period when every day contained an adventure, a discovery or an epiphany. Re-reading it now, on the cusp of my 50th birthday, what was even more pleasurable than being reminded of forgotten places and adventures, was that sensation of recovering the raw intoxication of travel during a moment in life when time is endless, and deadlines, responsibilities and commitments are non-existent; when the constitution is elastic, and the optimism of youth undimmed; when experience is all you hope to achieve and when the world is laid out before you like a map, ready and waiting to be explored.

The great Swiss travel writer, Nicolas Bouvier, wrote that being on the road, ‘deprived of one’s usual setting, the customary routine stripped away like so much wrapping paper,’ reduces you, yet makes you at the same time more ‘open to curiosity, to intuition, to love at first sight… Travelling outgrows its motives. It soon proves sufficient in itself. You think you are making a trip, but soon it is making you—or unmaking you.’

For better or worse, In Xanadu made me. I am still with the editor who bought the book for Collins, Michael Fishwick: we have now worked on eight books together about the Middle East, and South and Central Asia – the world opened up for me by that 1986 journey. Shortly after it was published, I married my very charming flatmate, who had edited much of the manuscript, even though she was then working for finals. Together, we moved out to Delhi. She wanted to paint; I wanted to begin work on the book which became City of Djinns . Thirty years later, we’re still there, with three children, the eldest of whom is now herself at university, planning her own ambitious trips around the world.

I still see my two long suffering travelling companions. Lousia is now a skilled picture restorer, married a very handsome and rich young man, and they live in some style in the Anglo-Welsh marches south of Hay on Wye. Laura went on – to no one’s surprise – to become one of the country’s most successful – and formidable – businesswomen and pops up in the press every now and then having climbed some dizzying new corporate pinnacle.

Many of the countries we passed through have fared less happily. Syria, so hospitable to us, is now gripped by civil war and the Islamist anarchy of Isil. Pakistan, so thrillingly wild yet alluring then, is now a much more dangerous and tortured country than it was in the 1980s. Conversely, China – then a land of bicycles, Mao suits and tannoys blaring strident political slogans down every main street – has become the world’s newest economic superpower, something unimaginable at the time. So much has changed.

Travel writing has also changed. If travel writing used principally to be about place – about filling in the blanks of the map and describing remote places that few had seen – the best 21st-century travel writing is almost always about people: exploring the extraordinary diversity that still exists in the world beneath the veneer of globalisation. As Jonathan Raban memorably remarked: ‘Old travellers grumpily complain that travel is now dead and that the world is a suburb. They are quite wrong. Lulled by familiar resemblances between all the unimportant things, they miss the brute differences in everything of importance.’

Raban is not alone in this conviction. Colin Thubron, perhaps the most revered of all the travel writers of the 80s still at work. He is also clear that the genre is now more needed than ever: ‘Great swaths of the world are hardly visited and remain much misunderstood – think of Iran,’ he told me recently. ‘A good travel writer can give you the warp and weft of everyday life, the generalities of people’s existence that is rarely reflected in academic writing or journalism, and hardly touched on by any other discipline. Despite the internet, google maps and the revolution in communications, there is still no substitute.’

In Xanadu records a world that has in many ways already disappeared, and it is an oddly avuncular pleasure to see one’s own memories slowly turn into the raw material of history. Yet for all its youthful innocence and naivety, and the excruciating sense of entitlement exuded by the narrator, as well as the occasional downright silliness of the opinions he expresses, I am still immensely proud of this book, and prouder that the Folio Society have chosen to reissue it. This, after all, was the journey and the book which started everything for me. I feel immense nostalgia looking through the photographs the Folio Society has painstakingly selected from bundles of my old negatives, and hope that the text too still retains some interest, 25 years on: a message in a bottle from a lost moment in time and space, fished ashore and opened up anew.

William Dalrymple is an award-winning writer.  In Xanadu: A Quest  is published by the Folio Society

Why Apple killed its electric car

travel writer xanadu

Because you read about china

China is set for a serious economic fall

Martin Vander Weyer

Also by William Dalrymple

How a humiliating defeat secured Britain its empire

travel writer xanadu

Get ready for the cowboy renaissance

travel writer xanadu

A Quest (Text Only)

  • 3.0 • 2 Ratings

Publisher Description

One of the most successful, influential and acclaimed travel books of recent years from the author of ‘Return of a King’, which has been shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson prize. At the age of twenty-two, William Dalrymple left his college in Cambridge to travel to the ruins of Kublai Khan’s stately pleasure dome in Xanadu. This is an account of a quest which took him and his companions across the width of Asia, along dusty, forgotten roads, through villages and cities full of unexpected hospitality and wildly improbable escapades, to Coleridge’s Xanadu itself. At once funny and knowledgeable, In Xanadu is in the finest tradition of British travel writing. Told with an exhilarating blend of eloquence, wit, poetry and delight, it is already established as a classic of its kind. Reviews ‘Brilliant’ Spectator ‘Glorious’ Patrick Leigh Fermor ‘Dalrymple is probably the best travel writer of his generation’ Daily Mail ‘The future of travel writing lies in the hands of gifted authors like Dalrymple’ Sara Wheeler, Independent About the author In Xanadu won the Yorkshire Post Best First Work Award and the Scottish Arts Council Spring Book Award, and was shortlisted for the John Llewelyn Rhys Prize. Dalrymple’s second book, City of Djinns, won the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award and the Sunday Times Young British Writer of the Year Award. His third, From the Holy Mountain, was published in April 1997, and won the Scottish Arts Council Autumn Book Award and was shortlisted for the Duff Cooper Award and the Thomas Cook Award. His latest book, The Age of Kali, was published in 1998.

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY JUL 1, 1990

Following in the footsteps of Marco Polo, then-Cambridge University student Dalrymplepk embarks on an overland journey from Jerusalem to Xanadu, through ``twelve thousand miles of extremely dangerous, inhospitable territory.'' Ultimately, there is scarcely any danger, but there is ample history and color. In the ancient city of Acre, Dalrymple refuses narcotics from an Arab boy who, when praised for his excellent English, reveals that he learned it in jail. When Dalrymple reaches Iran with a female companion in tow, he is surprised by how tolerant and Westernized Iranians are, despite the religious revolution. Upon seeing a sign that says, ``Allah Commands the Re-use of Renewable Resources,'' the author observes, ``We had expected anything of the Ayatollah. But hardly that he would turn out to be an enthusiastic ecologist.'' Dalrymple is a delightful guide, capable of waxing poetic upon first sight of the Euphrates River, while maintaining the bright-eyed perceptions of an explorer. When, like Polo, he arrives in Xanadu with a phial of holy oil, it is the culmination of a brave and fantastic journey. The author is bureau chief for the London Sunday Correspondent in New Delhi. First serial to Conde Nast Traveler.

More Books by William Dalrymple

travel writer xanadu

In Xanadu by William Dalrymple

William Dalrymple is one of the few authors whose books I have read all of. With my recent completion of  In Xanadu,  that is. Based on a journey that he took in 1986 at the fresh age of 21, it is the travel-writer-turned historian’s first book. The journey narrated followed Marco Polo’s journey from Jerusalem to Xanadu, and passed through Syria, Turkey, Iran, Pakistan and various regions of China, including Kashgar in the far west. Dalrymple was a student at Cambridge University at the time, and had received a study-travel grant under dubious pretenses. The rapid-fire journey across parts of the Middle East, Central and North Asia was made during a single summer break, and is comically ambitious in its goals. 

I’ve read and written about Dalrymple’s work a lot, because he tends to focus on South Asia these days (you can read my review of his last book,  Return of a King,  on the Himal Southasian website ).  In Xanadu  is a travel narrative that glaringly shows how Dalrymple’s style has changed and developed over the years. It’s a book that he now feels deeply ambivalent about, and is in fact quite embarrassed by. As the 25th anniversary special edition was released last year, and I encountered Dalrymple’s reiteration of his embarrassment, I thought it was time that I backtracked through his oeuvre and read where his writing career all began.

In Xanadu  certainly does resemble old-style travelogues, primarily by white men, who bowl through the world describing, categorising and judging it and the ‘exotic’ people they meet. Dalrymple writes in the introduction to the 25th anniversary edition of the book that Eric Newby, Bruce Chatwin, Peter Fleming, Patrick Leigh Fermor and Robert Byron were his ‘literary Gods, at whose altars [he] worshipped with an almost fundamentalist fervour.’ Stylistically, this is very evident, as is his upper-class, male bias. As Dalrymple writes about his younger self:

In Xanadu records the impressions, prejudices and enthusiasms of a very young, naïve and deeply Anglocentric undergraduate. Indeed my 21 year old self – bumptious, cocky and self-confident, quick to judge and embarrassingly slow to hesitate before stereotyping entire nations – is a person I now feel mildly disapproving of: like some smugly self-important but charming nephew who you can’t quite disown, but feel like giving a good tight slap to, or at least cutting down to size, for his own good.

Dalrymple is quick to judge in  In Xanadu.  He doesn’t say many pleasant things about Turkey or the Turkish people, and takes out whatever bad experiences he seems to have had with them through quite personal attacks:

Good looks have been shared out unevenly among the Turks. Their men are almost all handsome with dark, supple skin and strong features: good bones, sharp eyes and tall, masculine bodies. But the women share their menfolk’s pronounced features in a most unflattering way. Very few are beautiful. Their noses are too large, their chins too prominent. Baggy wraps conceal pneumatic bodies. Here must lie the reason for the Turks’ easy drift out of heterosexuality. (p. 71)

He also makes judgments about nations’ motivations that I suspect that the William Dalrymple of today–who has lived more than two decades in India–would cringe at:

Over China as a whole one million people were killed and thirty million persecuted [during the Cultural Revolution]. What I did not understand was how the nation which, for five thousand years had produced the most delicate and elegant art the world ever saw, could suddenly turn face and became [sic] viciously, violently iconoclastic. Paul Scott was puzzled by a similar paradox in India: how could the Indians, the most courteous and gentle people on earth, suddenly turn to frenzies of orgiastic violence? Scott’s answer was that the Indian really was emotionally predisposed against violence; hence his hysteria when he surrendered to it. […] By analogy, I thought, perhaps the Cultural Revolution was as brutal as it was simply because it went so deeply against everything Chinese culture stood for. (p. 293)

Yet Dalrymple is also self-deprecating in a characteristically British manner that is quietly funny and endearing. Such as when he muses on the fact that in Pakistan, he and his female travelling companions were admired as beautiful, being tall, fair, big-hipped (the women, at least). Yet once they reached China they were shunned as ugly, even making children cry. The Uighurs couldn’t believe that women’s breasts could be so large, and didn’t like what they saw.

I had read so much about  In Xanadu  before I picked it up to read, and found that I disapproved of it less than I thought I would. It didn’t feel outdated so much as of another era, a book that could have been written as early as the 1940s. Like much good travel writing, the scope of Dalrymple’s journey inspires me to be a little bit braver.

(Top image: Flickr/Dave ).

Image Unavailable

Xanadu: Marco Polo and Europe's Discovery of the East

  • To view this video download Flash Player

Follow the author

John Man

Xanadu: Marco Polo and Europe's Discovery of the East Paperback – November 1, 2010

  • Print length 352 pages
  • Language English
  • Publisher Bantam Press
  • Publication date November 1, 2010
  • Dimensions 5 x 1 x 8 inches
  • ISBN-10 0553820028
  • ISBN-13 978-0553820027
  • See all details

The Amazon Book Review

Similar items that may deliver to you quickly

Marco Polo: From Venice to Xanadu

Editorial Reviews

From booklist, about the author, product details.

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Bantam Press; Illustrated edition (November 1, 2010)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 352 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0553820028
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0553820027
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 10 ounces
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5 x 1 x 8 inches
  • #4,542 in Expeditions & Discoveries World History (Books)
  • #10,753 in Chinese History (Books)
  • #17,498 in Travelogues & Travel Essays

Important information

To report an issue with this product or seller, click here .

About the author

travel writer xanadu

I write mainly about Mongolia. Why Mongolia? It’s a long story. Here’s a shot version.

I am the child of Kentish villages, Rolvenden and Benenden. I’ve been escaping ever since. At the King’s School, Canterbury, I had an inspiring German teacher. So: German (and French) at Oxford and a year in Vienna, which left me intrigued by the Iron Curtain, and what it hid. During a post-grad in the History of Science, I helped plan an expedition to Mongolia, because in the 1960s the far side of the Soviet Empire sounded truly exotic. To join the expedition, I became the sole student of Mongolian at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies. The trip was a crazy idea, and never happened, but it left me yearning to go.

Ambitious to know the world, I joined Reuters. A year in Bonn revealed a profound ignorance of recent history. So I joined a magazine, The History of the 20th Century, working with two great historians, AJP Taylor and JM Roberts. Publishing with Time -Life Books led to life as a freelance writer, first in Oxford, raising a wonderful family, now grown and flown, then raising another in London, ditto.

I wrote forgettable books for forgotten companies. I lived with a jungle tribe in Ecuador, ghosted, wrote two thrillers, drafted several un-makable film-scripts, and at last, in the 1990s, after the Soviet Union and its empire collapsed, I went to Mongolia.

I discovered an amazing land, amazing people, and world-changing history that is remarkably under-appreciated. I try to bring the past alive by combining history with personal experience. This 25-year passion has inspired a score of books and driven me to the outer limits of the Mongol Empire in China, Japan, Central Asia and Hungary.

Customer reviews

Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.

  • Sort reviews by Top reviews Most recent Top reviews

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. please try again later..

travel writer xanadu

Top reviews from other countries

travel writer xanadu

  • Amazon Newsletter
  • About Amazon
  • Accessibility
  • Sustainability
  • Press Center
  • Investor Relations
  • Amazon Devices
  • Amazon Science
  • Start Selling with Amazon
  • Sell apps on Amazon
  • Supply to Amazon
  • Protect & Build Your Brand
  • Become an Affiliate
  • Become a Delivery Driver
  • Start a Package Delivery Business
  • Advertise Your Products
  • Self-Publish with Us
  • Host an Amazon Hub
  • › See More Ways to Make Money
  • Amazon Visa
  • Amazon Store Card
  • Amazon Secured Card
  • Amazon Business Card
  • Shop with Points
  • Credit Card Marketplace
  • Reload Your Balance
  • Amazon Currency Converter
  • Your Account
  • Your Orders
  • Shipping Rates & Policies
  • Amazon Prime
  • Returns & Replacements
  • Manage Your Content and Devices
  • Recalls and Product Safety Alerts
  • Conditions of Use
  • Privacy Notice
  • Your Ads Privacy Choices

Xanadu

  • Published: 1 November 2010
  • ISBN: 9781409045649
  • Imprint: Transworld Digital
  • Format: EBook

travel writer xanadu

The respected historian and travel writer, John Man, tells the remarkable story of the world's most famous traveller - Marco Polo - and the moment when East met West for the first time.

**A SOURCE FOR MARCO POLO , A NETFLIX ORIGINAL SERIES**

Marco Polo's journey from Venice, through Europe and most of Asia, to the court of Kublai Khan in China is one of the most audacious in history. His account of his experiences, known simply as The Travels , uncovered an entirely new world of emperors and concubines, great buildings - 'stately pleasure domes' in Coleridge's dreaming - huge armies and imperial riches. His book shaped the West's understanding of China for hundreds of years.

John Man travelled in Marco's footsteps to Xanadu, in search of the truth behind Marco's stories; to separate legend from fact. Drawing on his own journey, archaeology and archival study, John Man paints a vivid picture of the man behind the myth and the true story of the great court of Kublai Khan.

About the author

John Man is a historian and travel writer with a special interest in Mongolia. After reading German and French at Oxford he did two postgraduate courses, one in the history of science at Oxford, the other in Mongolian at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London.

John has written acclaimed and highly successful biographies of Genghis Khan, Attila the Hun and Kublai Khan as well as Alpha Beta, on the history of the alphabet, and The Gutenberg Revolution, on the invention of printing.

portrait photo of John Man

Also by John Man

Barbarians at the Wall

Praise for Xanadu

I have read everything written on Marco Polo, and John Man's Xanadu is, by far, my favorite book on the subject. It's not only an over-due and important historical study, it's an entertaining ride every step of the way. As a researcher, John Man not only puts himself on the very ground that Marco traversed, he takes us with him on the epic journey. JOHN FUSCO, Creator of "Marco Polo", a Netflix Original Series
[John Man] cultivates the sense of wonder in describing unknown lands and unknown peoples; making it easy to imagine being at the court of Kublai Khan, the most powerful man of the time, and experiencing the wonders of another time and place. San Francisco Book Review
An in-the-footsteps-of-Marco-Polo journey through Europe to China which really makes you feel you are wearing Polo's threadbare, sweat-stained slippers as you go The Scotsman
John Man's engaging and diverting study of the historical Xanadu renders the truths as beguiling as the mythology . . . with a combination of travel writing, historical analysis and anecdote, Man uses Xanadu almost as a keyhole through which to describe larger events Scotland on Sunday

Related titles

Our top books, exclusive content and competitions. straight to your inbox..

Sign up to our newsletter using your email.

By clicking subscribe, I acknowledge that I have read and agree to Penguin Books Australia’s Terms of Use and Privacy Policy .

Thank you! Please check your inbox and confirm your email address to finish signing up.

travel writer xanadu

Document Journal

Living at xanadu: ten writers muse on joan didion’s literary legacy.

Text by Morgan Becker

Artwork by Nicolas Party

Cynthia Zarin, Ira Silverberg, Fariha Róisín, and others reflect on the reach of the iconic American voice

“It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends,” Joan Didion wrote at the start of her seminal essay “Goodbye to All That.” “I can remember now, with a clarity that makes the nerves in the back of my neck constrict, when New York began for me, but I cannot lay my finger upon the moment it ended.”

Didion’s New York was different from ours—different, even, from the one that existed just before she published the essay in 1967, by virtue of the fact that her cutting perspective burrowed into the collective local consciousness, dissecting the spell that the city once cast so you could see it exactly as she did: as “an infinitely romantic notion, the mysterious nexus of all love and money and power.” New York, Didion wrote, was “only for the very young,” and it was “distinctly possible to stay too long at the Fair.”

Upon her passing in late December, the Los Angeles Times published a tribute piece that put it well: “Only a great artist creates and ruins a genre at the same time.” Didion fashioned a literary cliché—an inimitable narrative, which essayists everywhere still strive to match—and, in the same breath, knocked the technicolor dream of New York City down a level. It’s not that Didion achieved legendary status by being glamorously jaded. It’s that the way she thought—and the way she put it down on paper—was singular in the truest sense of the word. Didion was the first and the best to frame it that way—whatever it and that way happened to be.

On losing a husband and daughter: “Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life.”

On the wrongful conviction of the Central Park Five: “For as long as this case held the city’s febrile attention, then, it offered a narrative for the city’s distress, a frame in which the actual social and economic forces wrenching the city could be personalized and ultimately obscured.”

On the reason to write in the first place: “To find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.”

Between the aesthetics, the politics, the psychology; considering the memoirs, the fiction, the New Journalism; and in light of her honesty, her modishness, her coolness, terseness, style, nuance, and lack of complication—what’s left to say about Joan Didion’s legacy? For Document, 10 writers across the cultural landscape reflect on the reach of the unforgettable American voice, from New York to California to everywhere.

 “She lived, as it were, along with us, showing us—with her characteristic precision, clarity, and elegance—what it is like to be young, then older; how it feels to have and then to lose; to hold and then let go.”

Marlowe Granados Filmmaker and author of Happy Hour

Didion always made leaving New York seem like an experience worth having. Even at her most journalistic, I always found her work fragrant. There was flair. She had a particular rhythm to language that influenced generations of writers to view the world with her signature—Didion’s exacting gaze. She was the kind of writer who had people scrambling to find their own kind of flair. She made it look easy.

Francine Prose Critic, essayist, author of Blue Angel

In her beautiful 1967 essay, “Goodbye to All That,” Joan Didion wrote that it was impossible for anyone brought up in the East to understand what the city, what the idea of the city, meant “to those of us who came out of the West and the South.” Having grown up in New York, I remember agreeing—and then going on to read a description of a childhood, a fantasy childhood, that was even more unlike my own than Didion’s accounts of coming of age in California. That child “who has always had an uncle on Wall Street and who has spent several hundred Saturdays first at F.A.O. Schwarz and being fitted for shoes at Best’s and then waiting under the Biltmore clock and dancing to Lester Lanin”—who was she? And who in the world was Lester Lanin? My friends and I grew up listening to early Motown, singing doo-wop, our voices vastly improved by the flattering acoustics of subway stations. We dreamed not of shoe fittings at Best’s but of handmade sandals from the Village, and if our uncles went anywhere near Wall Street, it was to pay their annual tax-time visits to their accountants.

I left New York at around the same time as Didion reports at the end of her essay, not for LA but for Cambridge, Massachusetts—where I never stopped grieving for New York, where I never stopped feeling that I had been exiled from a lost paradise. How could I have wound up in a place where strangers on the MTA seemed to have been fashioned entirely out of dough and where I searched in vain for a classmate who listened to James Brown?

In retrospect, what’s striking about “Goodbye to All That” is how white Joan Didion’s New York was—how everyone she knew seemed to be young, upwardly mobile, and (no matter how much of an outsider they might have felt) confident and attractive. When one left the city in which I’d grown up, or was compelled by circumstances to leave, it was because life there had become unsustainable—too expensive, too dangerous, too unwelcoming—and not from the personal malaise or anomie that drove Didion and her husband back to California.

The city that Didion wrote about in “New York”—her 1990 essay about the Central Park jogger case—was much more like the place I recognized, the city that had always been there, barely concealed beneath the glittering veneer of parties and martinis that Didion had described 23 years earlier. It was, as she noted, a metropolis of “8 million stories and all the same story, each devised to obscure not only the city’s actual tensions of race and class but also, more significantly, the civic and commercial arrangements that rendered those tensions irreconcilable.” It had become a city in which “the more privileged, and especially the more privileged white, citizens of New York had begun to feel unnerved at high noon in even their own neighborhoods.”

Reading the two essays, one after the other, feels a bit like watching someone wake up from a reverie: being startled out of a dream of “new faces” and meetings under the Biltmore clock and awakening to a world in which young men of color could be accused and wrongfully convicted of assaulting a white woman, a world in which one had been obliged to replace the fantasies and endless possibilities of youth—with all its glorious and painful opportunities for self-reflection—for the harsher and more complex realities of adulthood. The differences between the two essays may, I think, partly explain why Didion has become such an iconic and beloved writer: We feel that she lived, as it were, along with us, showing us—with her characteristic precision, clarity, and elegance—what it is like to be young, then older; how it feels to have and then to lose; to hold and then let go.

In sentence after sentence, essay after essay, she helped us to see how experience can be at once intensely personal and broadly universal, what it means to have our eyes opened: to open our eyes.

“I didn’t realize worthiness was inherent and not something each person is assigned or not assigned, and I didn’t quite get that I was important, valid, just by virtue of being on this planet. Alive.”

Bob Colacello Vanity Fair contributor, man about town, author of Out

In high school and college my literary idols were Rimbaud, Eliot, Kafka, and Burroughs. And then along came Joan Didion in 1968 with Slouching Towards Bethlehem , opening my eyes to how powerful nonfiction could be.

Fariha Róisín Poet, novelist, author of How to Cure a Ghost

Self-respect has been a pursuit of mine since the beginning of the pandemic, and became a necessary venture after I realized I didn’t have any. I was so easily susceptible to self-ridicule and embarrassment that my whole life became a tepid clown show of me doing juggling acts to prove that I was valuable. I didn’t realize worthiness was inherent and not something each person is assigned or not assigned, and I didn’t quite get that I was important, valid, just by virtue of being on this planet. Alive.

Joan Didion seems like she had self-respect, but then I remember she was a (triple) Sagittarius and I wonder if she was plagued by the same sentient sound of the eerie longing left by shame. Shame is the opposite of self-respect and it really is an imposition. I remember reading that John Gregory Dunne, Didion’s husband (a Gemini) had a rapturous temper. Explosive enough to note, which is always a warning sign. As someone who has seen the way that violence permeates and ruptures a family, I was surprised by Dunne’s temerity and maybe, judgmentally, a bit shocked by Didion’s unwavering support ushered through her silence.

Self-respect is hard to gather when you feel you have not gained the merit worthy of the respect you seek, meaning: I have high expectations of who I am and who I want to be. An unwavering Capricorn in every detail, I seek the height of mountains… So how to gain respect for a self still in motion? A self in (constant) evolution?

It wasn’t until recently that I realized I didn’t have to hold myself by a leash anymore, that self-respect could be gained through witnessing oneself in a total way.

Both Joan and I are Cancer Risings, our hearts are our pilgrimages, we see tenderness as a virtue. You can tell in the way she would cascade emotion through her sentences, weaving them with the grace of a swan, pulling together feeling and words with such candor and gentle regard. Sooner or later , my therapist told me, you have to pay attention to what you give, who you are, and see value in that. As a Capricorn, because I had not won in a traditional way—not with family, nor inheritance, nor schooling, nor the awards and grants awarded to those who know the right people—I felt less than. Because of this, I felt unworthy.

I don’t want to scream anymore; now, I choose the elegance of sitting back and observing. Getting older (for me) means giving fewer fucks. It means people become predictable and patterns reveal themselves quicker. Self-respect has been mustered from deep within me—within the dance that is conjured each day, sacrosanct, I find a way to evoke the power inside and let it guide me into a trance. Hindu Vedic scholars figured out kundalini energy by studying the composition of the energetic bodies of humans; through deep spiritual investigation, they conceptualized our chakras. When I think of self-respect, I think of my ancestors. Hindu or Muslim, elders are elders with wisdom that I seek.

And, what other way to describe a Sagittarius? Other than one who is in constant hunger for higher knowledge. It’s my ninth year, ruled by Sagittarius, and in tarot the ninth card is the strength card. I think of that word when I think of Didion, isolated in Manhattan in her apartment full of ghosts. What it must’ve taken to muster such barrels of courage and strength in order to move through the chaos of death—to synthesize it in words so others can grieve through you. The loss of an only child and husband is a death of oneself, in some regard, and she carried on two decades alone without the both of them by her side. Strength builds self-respect.

When she was 28 years old, Didion moved back to California from New York, describing it as “distinctly possible to stay too long at the Fair”—a description that was apt as I transplanted myself from New York to California for the first time, just a few months prior to now, as I write in my cool apartment in Silver Lake. As a child of Australia, I’ve learned from Los Angeles, my new home, that geography has its own pull, and the land has secrets worthy of deep exploration. I feel the most rooted here, knowing Didion spent years here, too, writing books and screenplays and essays on the Black Panther Party. I use her as a totem of self-regard; from the conversations between our two minds, I gather self-respect.

“Her goodbye to New York lasted for a time, and then she came back, to the city that claimed her anomie, her anxiety, her tendency to repeat herself; to go back and say it again, and for once, try to get it right.”

Cynthia Zarin New Yorker contributor, poet behind Orbit

How old was I when I first read Didion’s essay, “Goodbye to All That?” Fifteen, 16? At 17 I was on the 104 bus riding north up Broadway under a theatrical blue sky curved like a convex mirror, and I thought: My life begins now. Who knows why? I had been born six blocks away. All I had to say goodbye to was childhood, and an interminable sense of waiting for the curtain to lift. I knew passages by heart. I recited under my breath, I was in love with New York. I do not mean “love” in any colloquial way, I mean that I was in love with the city, the way you love the first person who ever touches you and you never love anyone quite that way again.  What did I know? No one had touched me. I had no idea what in any colloquial way meant, except that the word colloquial sounded to me like the chattering sparrows that congregated in the shrubs by the stairs down to the IRT subway at Columbus Circle; a heightened, mysterious whir. Five years or six years later I was at a party at the St. Regis, wearing a dress made of mauve plastic lace, on a balcony overlooking the starry park, and a man more than twice my age, whom the party was for (he had spent two decades writing a book about which I remember only his description of the taste of a screen door on the tongue), took my glass of champagne, poured it over the edge, and said, “You think it will always be like this. Well, it won’t.”

During a subway renovation, the shrubbery disappeared, and I worried about the birds. By then I had read Didion’s essay “On Self-Respect” and could quote: The day that I did not make Phi Beta Kappa nonetheless marked the end of something, and innocence may well be the word for it and However long we postpone it, we eventually lie down alone in that notoriously uncomfortable bed, the one we make ourselves. By then I was indeed lying in the bed I had made; the sheets snarled, damp with 3 a.m. jitters. In those days, when we knew almost no one who was dead, we smoked, and there were burn holes on the pillowcases, eyelets outlined in blackened kohl. It would be years before I realized that if you make your bed in the morning, at least you’ve done something. On dismal days, when trying to stave off huge floods of tears (the price of some of my lies) was my main activity, I thought without fail of Didion’s at-home remedy for a broken heart: It is difficult in the extreme to continue fancying oneself Cathy in ‘Wuthering Heights’ with one’s head in a Food Fair bag. “On Self-Respect” first appeared in Vogue , over 60 years ago, with the subtitle, in italics, “Its source, its power.”

Didion was from California. Her goodbye to New York lasted for a time, and then she came back, to the city that claimed her anomie, her anxiety, her tendency to repeat herself; to go back and say it again, and for once, try to get it right. When the Columbus Circle station stairs reopened, the shrubs and clamorous birds returned. Some of us never said goodbye—where would we go, when right next to that shiny bar in Brooklyn, your father used to smack a Spaldeen against the stoop? As she predicted, after that balcony scene I went to parties where I knew everyone, but only much later did I understand that just possibly not everyone is who you thought they were. What I mean to say is, using the comma as a stammer, which makes it seem as if you are trying hard to get to the truth, is that her work for me was a manual not only for writing but for living. In the end, those dicta turned out to be close kin. Narrowing my eyes, my view of that girl on the balcony, who pretended she knew what to make of a man who poured a drink into the darkness, and then what to make of her, is through the lens she gave me to see.

“I cried because I saw her work as history. I cried because I understood that Joan Didion’s death was, finally, the official end of the 20th century.”

Ira Silverberg Editor, arts consultant, literary citizen

The first thing I noticed about Joan Didion was how good she looked. It was May 1983, at the American Academy of Arts & Letters annual ceremony in Upper Manhattan. William Burroughs was being inducted. Allen Ginsberg was proudly holding court. He’d convinced the very stuffy membership to invite Burroughs to its ranks. He explained to me that Didion was important in swaying the vote.

Didion had reviewed William’s novel The Soft Machine a decade before, saying the fine thing about Burroughs and the novel was that they both were, “complex, subtle, (and) allusive… hard, derisive, inventive, free, funny, serious, poetic, indelibly American, a voice in which one hears transistor radios and old movies and all the clichés and all the cons and all the newspapers, all the peculiar optimism, all the failure. Against that voice, those of the younger ‘satirical’ or ‘black’ novelists sound self-conscious and faked; it is the voice of a natural, and what it is saying is in no sense the point.” She sounded almost like Burroughs there for a minute.

I was a 20-year-old member of the Burroughs retinue then. I was overwhelmed by the intellectual and artistic superpower in the room. One of the ways I’d compensate for my youth, and my naïve yet emerging literary and cultural vocabulary and opinions, was to talk about clothing. I’d worked at the now-mythological Charivari in high school in the late ’70s, and I could always fall back on fashion. She was in white cashmere, I think. But had I read her?  My anxiety was rising as Ginsberg began to make the intros.

I tried on a potential conversation that relied on having read her in high school. She’d be amused by this little fellow who’d read her at Bronx Science. In truth, I’d only just read Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album , and knew better than to gush.

I wanted to believe that I sold her that cashmere sweater, or something classic and chic, so we could bond over WASP signifiers. Was she wearing white Belgian Shoes? We didn’t carry classics at Charivari, rather we minted new ones. And she was Upper East, and Charivari was Upper West—distinctions that seemed to matter then. And I was a Bronx Jew living in Lawrence, Kansas. I would read more of her work.

She first won an Academy Award (1978) and then gained membership (1981) in the almost all-male Academy. Burroughs, whose family was like Midwestern Watsons—pushing capitalist America ahead with practical technologies and good family names—was a dark horse, a renegade, a Queer, and likely wouldn’t have been admitted to the Academy had Allen not, essentially, forced his way in. Didion made sense as an Academy member. More so than Burroughs. It warmed my heart that she supported him. I kept on reading her. I loved seeing photos of her, clad in white, that look of hers—all-knowing. I saw her as a visionary writer.

When I returned from Kansas, I began a career in publishing. I also worked two nights a week as a nightclub doorman. Until recently, for people of modest means, jobs in the culture sector required a second income to survive. Entry level was for upper-class kids. I shape-shifted in social scenes and I would see her and her husband at parties. I would always remind her that we met when I was quite young and how much that had meant to me. I was seeing her through a nostalgic filter.

She was utterly charming, but when I would get heady about her role in the culture, she’d demur. She seemed to get more stylish as the years went on. Sometimes I’d ask where a bracelet or scarf came from. My recollection is that they were appropriately matched to her age and station—but with some Euro flair. Was that a Bulgari bracelet?

She resided in a particular pantheon of writers I deemed out of my league. She was with the Updikes and Cheevers. I was in the tribe with the Ackers, Ginsbergs, and Tillmans. That woman was fierce, upper-class, and an unparalleled critical stylist. My people were beginning to enter the literary space with work that was born of a different cultural point of view—whether working-class, transgressive, or formally challenging. I continued to read her; I appreciated her clarity; I began to understand that the genius was entirely “dominant culture.”

I bottomed out when I read The Year of Magical Thinking . The denial of death shocked me. I wanted her to be “enlightened” and embrace her husband’s death; understand life cycles, karma; lead her readers into greater acceptance of the inevitable. It was an unfair judgment born of having lived through the AIDS crisis. I heard friends laud the book, speak to her “amazing” emotional availability, and I judged them too. That dominant culture thing was bugging me.

I hated that book. I wanted her to transcend her WASPiness.

In 2015, my friend James Danziger put on an exhibit of Julian Wasser’s portraits of Joan—Joan in front of the Corvette, the classic publicity still—which I bought. She’s young, beautiful, casual in a loose-fitting white top and loose-fitting printed pants. Joan, looking like the rock star of letters that she was—but an elegant rock star. If Joan Baez had been born a Biddle, perhaps… Had she done the Céline campaign yet? She was gorgeous in those photos. But the Julian Wasser photo, that was the Joan I loved. The visionary. The point of view I could only hope to aspire to.

The photo moved from one place of employment to another, and finally to my library at home, hanging alongside portraits by Ginsberg, and of Acker and Burroughs. That was always off somehow. But there she stayed, in the pantheon of writers who changed how I see the world, until late last year.I was at a plant medicine retreat in the jungle outside Tulum when she died. I went with the hope of transcending sorrow. I was hoping to start the new year with a different take—fill the space of grief with love; accept that loss is permanent rather than a low-grade perpetual sadness that has plagued me since the late ’80s. When I got to the airport in Tulum, I turned on the Times app. I’d been in a media blackout for a week. There was her obit. I burst into tears in the security line.

I cried because I loved her work and it helped to define my sensibilities. I cried because I was so happy that my sensibilities had evolved. I cried for America as it reckoned with so much. I cried because I felt so hopeless about that reckoning. I cried because I saw her work as history. I cried because I understood that Joan Didion’s death was, finally, the official end of the 20th century.

The photo by Julian Wasser hangs over my bar now. The irony is that I don’t drink.

“Joan turned out to be an intoxicating mix of artist and hack, the kind of writer whose profound certainty about what they want to say paradoxically makes them completely open to the idea of being edited.”

Daisy Prince Editor-at-Large for AirMail and founder of Digital Party

I was living in London when I discovered Joan Didion. A friend who worked at the New Yorker sent me The White Album as a present after a dinner party. It was the first time I encountered her tone. Initially, it seemed both laconic and spacey, the very essence of stoned California laid-back cool. She was a writer with an almost prenatural ability to know when just one or two well-placed words would outperform long sentences or rambling paragraphs. Frankly, I was intimidated by her writing and intimidated by her. Even when she was overawed herself, like she was in the beginning of her famous essay, “Goodbye to All That,” she seemed to capture the essence of the vulnerability of youth without getting overly emotional or gushing. She was sylphlike, a cipher to me. Even physically, her impossible slimness, slimness unachievable by any amount of dieting or exercise, seemed like her writing—effortless and a gift that mere mortals could never obtain.

I know her great-niece Annabelle Dunne; we worked together at Vanity Fair and would have dinner sometimes on her trips back to New York from LA when she was filming the documentary about her Aunt Joan.

Annabelle would tell me how hard it was to watch this incredible mind in its decline. (Joan had Parkinson’s disease, which was also the disease that eventually killed my own father after a 25-year struggle.) Knowing a bit about Parkinson’s and how it quietly boxes in the mind (“death by a thousand cuts,” my mother used to say about my father’s own struggles) and always seems to strike down minds that race at a thousand miles an hour, minds always in fifth gear with synapses reacting so quickly that to be inside those minds must be like sitting at a Fourth of July fireworks show, I came to the conclusion that if Joan Didion had Parkinson’s, she couldn’t be California cool on the inside. She must have had a mind just as messy and hectic as the rest of us. Her ability was to tighten the output valve better than most. So I stopped feeling intimidated by her writing, and I started just appreciating it.

David Hare Director, screenwriter, playwright behind Plenty

An excerpt from We Travelled: Essays and Poems

It sounds odd maybe, callous even, to say that the 18 months I spent preparing and directing The Year of Magical Thinking were professionally among the happiest of my life. When I was first approached by the American producer Scott Rudin in November 2005 to direct a play Joan Didion wanted to write based on her hugely successful book, a couple of friends looked at me sideways. Was I sure? Did I really want to let myself in for such a long time addressing such forbidding subject matter? It was easy enough to spend a few hours reading a book about death which you could let flop in one hand while nursing a scotch in the other. But how would it be to spend months in the grueling Broadway system—endless previews, needless hysteria, erratic critics—in the company of a 72-year-old first-time playwright whose agony of grief was so raw? Wasn’t the prospect… well, rather austere? So it’s hard to explain why my own reaction—the one you have before you can think—was that the whole thing sounded, in prospect, highly enjoyable. I responded to Scott’s offer in a loose paraphrase of Citizen Kane : “Great. It sounds like we could have some fun.”

That our time with Magical Thinking in New York did indeed reward the whole company and crew with so much pleasure and humor is principally down to the spirit of the author. I had never met Joan before we started to consider how she might imagine a possible play. Nor, when I was first approached, had I even read her latest book. In Britain, Magical Thinking had not had anything like the impact it achieved in the US: It had not become the indispensable modern handbook to bereavement. At the turn of the century, however, I had written Joan a heartfelt fan letter, out of the blue, one author to another, about her collection of essays Political Fictions . She had answered with what I would now recognize as a characteristically courteous and thoughtful reply. It was self-evident to the most casual reader that by keeping herself away from any contact with Washington, Joan was able to define the characters and intentions of the leading imperial figures with far more insight than any Beltway insider. Her methods were deep research, intuition, and watching television. But beyond admiring her wonderfully obvious authorial stance—“Let’s talk about politics like we’re human beings”—I was struck by how she also made political reporting so fresh, so immediate, by not bothering with piety. Having started out as a roguish if complicated admirer of the ideals of Barry Goldwater, Joan brought to her view of the latest fearful idiots in the White House a marked personal prejudice in favor of courage, order, and liberty.

There is, of course, in all Joan’s reporting, an exciting tension between what appears to be the cool poise of her much-admired prose style and the banked-down, vivid heat of her feeling. Subjective and objective are at glorious war. So when I did finally meet her in Scott’s offices on 45th Street on a freezing January day in 2006, it was a difficult first step for me to point out to this apparently frail, painfully thin woman (“Under 75 pounds,” she said, “and you begin to feel the cold”) that we were facing an egregious artistic problem.

Since she had written her best-seller about the death of her husband, the screenwriter and novelist John Gregory Dunne, her daughter Quintana had also died, at the age of 39, after a series of terrifying medical incidents. For that reason, it was impossible to dramatize the book as it was. A mere recitation was anyway out of the question. Joan had written prose. Now we needed a play. But, more damagingly, the character on stage would look unintentionally stupid if she appeared to know less than the audience. How could she alone not know that her own daughter had died? What was required, therefore, was a full-scale reinvention, not only of the events themselves, but of the voice in which the events were recounted. An author who had dug as deep as she could into the madness which overwhelmed her upon her husband’s death was being asked by a director she didn’t know to subject her feelings for her daughter to a similar pitiless scrutiny.

Nothing is more testing for any writer, however distinguished, than to recast familiar material in a new form. If a work is any good at all, the author will have arrived at a tone, a shape, and a progress which all seem right and inevitable. But in asking Joan to start again, and in particular to address the question of who the narrator truly was—for the clarity of that question depends on the destiny of all one-person shows—I underestimated her Hollywood nous. Joan turned out to be an intoxicating mix of artist and hack, the kind of writer whose profound certainty about what they want to say paradoxically makes them completely open to the idea of being edited. In the coming months, I would get used to the questions “How’s this?” “What do you think?” and “Is this okay?”

“sometime soon the culture will shift again, rocking formerly fixed ideas. try as you might to hold on, but there is no point. i keep my distance. skating the bowl and watching intently. never diving in too deep.”

Sara Elmessiry, aka Felukah Rapper, songwriter, poet behind Other Beating Wings

let me tell you what i mean. two trains away from a side i’ve never seen. all you need is goodbye when all you want has yet to pass through you. through someone, something, somewhere else.

let’s say you found yourself in the city, swimming amidst promises and harsh realities. you’ll tell yourself stories in order to live. that’s no secret, we all do. you’ll paint a psychic portrait telling the story like it is. not glittery, not trying. still here. the haze you once craved called california in the ’60s and ’70s. you try chasing it down via nostalgia. psychedelic rock. a cigarette in the wind. nobody at the center and the center will not hold.

sometime soon the culture will shift again, rocking formerly fixed ideas. try as you might to hold on, but there is no point. i keep my distance. skating the bowl and watching intently. never diving in too deep.

in my head, didionism never dies. like her, i can seep into the mold of the mind i crave. like her, i often would rather not. most people walk around with their own preexisting judgments wrapped around them, cleverly highlighting and dimming distinctive qualities to fit every occasion. i know. i’ve seen it. others are less subtle trying to mask their individuality. no matter the case, consistent is the desire to belong. in some way. unless,

i play it as it lays. waiting, not anxiously, for a juncture in time to call my name. the broader picture hangs high on my bedroom wall. a sea filled with artists, writers, and musicians from one generation calling out to the last. the next reaching even further back, perhaps in an effort to reignite, reattach, reassemble. run, river. one’s first work of fiction will not be their last. lest the ink runs dry, or the time flies too fast. didion’s voice carries on through the vaults of prose and people her style inspired. not glittery, not trying. but here. but present. and filled with life.

Justin Vivian Bond Songwriter, cabaret artist, activist, performer-at-large

A monologue inspired by Joan Didion’s writings

I want to tell you the story of the summer of 1972 in Los Angeles. More specifically, the Holiday Inn in Burbank where I had my first taste of Manhattan-style clam chowder, of swimming in the shadow of the Capitol Records building, of “Sue’s girl.” The babysitter. “I’ll have Sue’s girl come over. She can watch ’em.”

My uncle Buddy, “Give me some of that candy, kid. I’m trying to stop smoking… Geez, what are these supposed to be? Raspberries? You got something against chocolate?”

Sue’s girl.

My aunt, who still lived back East, was a former TWA Air Hostess and a founding member of the Clipped Wings society. Unbeknownst to her, she and her two sons had been “replaced” by a new wife and a new family out West. A boy and a girl. Two perfectly blond children—one of whom would later go on to Harvard Law, the UN, Sierra Leone. Gotta make Daddy proud. But when confronted by the brutal realities of a civil war, a perfectly blond child can only bear to look at so many mangled Black bodies before they are forced to retreat from the ambitions of the father and open a bed-and-breakfast in the South of France with a handsome European wife, herself a breast cancer survivor and former legal counsel for the World Bank.

Dismembered body parts left in Freetown and The Hague. Dreams rebuked in Calabasas. No more California, no more El Dorado.

“But everyone knew we were the legitimate ones.”

Mission accomplished.

Legitimacies, potentialities, bars raised, bars passed. Manhattan-style clam chowder in the bar of the Holiday Inn in Burbank where “Sue’s girl” gave me permission to have as many Shirley Temples as I’d like.

“You sure you don’t want a Roy Rogers? Roy Rogerses are for boys.”

No, I’d rather have a Shirley Temple.

“Well, okay then. You can have as many Shirley Temples as you’d like.”

Uncle Buddy: “You gotta see Vegas. The lights are so bright it looks like it’s morning 24 hours a day. You can see it from space. I’ll get you a hotel. Tell you what—take the Lincoln, I’ll fly over in a few days and treat you to dinner at Caesars. It’d be a shame to be this close to Nevada and not see Vegas.”

Years later, when it was starting to become clear that my uncle should have stayed with the raspberry candies instead of switching back to Benson & Hedges Deluxe Ultra Light 100s, we were sitting around my mother’s kitchen table when the story broke on CNN that Farrah Fawcett, a former television star and “close personal family friend,” had been diagnosed with a rare form of anal cancer.

“Nothing can lick Farrah, she’s a gorgeous lady but she’s tough. Underneath all that soft, beautiful skin she’s rangy—she’s scrappy, tight. She’s got the body of a beautiful boy—like one of those boys you’d meet in Thailand.” Quick wink, another slug of Bombay Sapphire.

You gotta see Vegas. The lights are so bright it seems like morning 24 hours a day. You can see it from space.

Maybe I should talk about the renovation of my grandmother’s house, the family farm back East where she always said her greatest pleasure in life was sitting at the kitchen table and looking at the view of those beautiful mountains. After she died, my uncles decided to get the place in shape. Make it into a kind of tribute. The dream home she’d never had. Turn it into a showplace. Keep it in the family.

Plans were drawn up, improvements made. Why the dream had been deferred until after her death was never fully explained to me, but explanations take time. One thing’s for sure, by the time they’d finished with it, there was not one room, including the kitchen, from which you could enjoy that view. All you could see was the newly black-topped drive and the McMansions across the road.

A real showplace.

“I’ve lived here for over 60 years and not a day goes by when I don’t look out the window and thank the Good Lord for those beautiful mountains.”

You gotta see Vegas. It’s like the sun is shining 24 hours a day. It’s a modern miracle.

She’s rangy.

She’s got the body of one of those beautiful boys you’d meet in Thailand.

Clipped wings.

Aw, ya gotta see Vegas… Take my car.

Everyone knew we were the legitimate ones.

Iggy Teller does Teller

The sacrament of the secondhand, epistolary filth: the life and death of ‘j.d.s’ zine, chasing the mirage of the “future city”.

  • Share full article

A cobblestone path bordered by verdant trees and stone walls leads down to large strip of green grass and an ornate, large water fountain.

5 Favorite Places

The ‘Griselda’ Creator’s Miami

Eric Newman, who created the Netflix show “Narcos” and produced his new show with Sofia Vergara, shares his love for a lesser-known side of the South Florida playground.

A sort of American Versailles, Vizcaya Museum & Gardens in Coconut Grove has acres of outdoor gardens, a dozen buildings, a cafe, event spaces and, naturally, secret passageways throughout. Credit... Scott Baker for The New York Times

Supported by

By Danielle Pergament

  • March 1, 2024

The magic of Miami is that “you can still discover places,” said the writer and producer Eric Newman. “It doesn’t feel like people have a chip on their shoulder. There’s a healthy civic pride and gratitude.”

Mr. Newman, who created the Netflix show “Narcos” and produced “Griselda,” starring Sofia Vergara, has, over the years, spent months at a time on location in Miami. To Mr. Newman, a California native, the appeal of this southern Florida playground isn’t just what it is — it’s also what it’s not. “There’s an appreciation in Miami that you don’t see in other places,” he said. “Maybe it’s because a lot of people here came from somewhere else. Maybe you came to escape East Coast winters, or you came to escape Castro, or you came to escape taxes. People in Miami are genuinely happy to be here.”

Mr. Newman, 53, produced the Academy Award-winning movie “Children of Men” and, more recently, was the executive producer of “Painkiller” and “Narcos: Mexico.” He favors a side of Miami not easily found in guidebooks. An after-hours salsa club, a Xanadu hiding in plain sight, the best Cuban sandwich around: These are the secrets that Miami has slowly revealed to him.

A man with a short black beard and wearing a blue shirt stands on a balcony overlooking a white-sand beach.

“The diversity of Miami makes it feel like the least American city, which is kind of what makes it incredibly American,” Mr. Newman said. “It feels wonderfully foreign and yet uniquely American.”

Here, his five favorite spots in the city.

1. Café La Trova

“La Trova is a show,” explained Mr. Newman. “The waiters are all immaculately dressed, they dance. You can tell that working there is a career, not a job.”

La Trova, owned by the master bartender Julio Cabrera and the chef Michelle Bernstein, is beloved for its impeccable drinks and its theatricality. Although the establishment, in the middle of Little Havana, has a robust menu that leans heavily toward empanadas, croquetas and Cuban fare, the specialties are mojitos and other cocktails — made with all the flare of performance art. (La Trova was a James Beard semifinalist for its “Outstanding Bar Program” in 2022.) The décor, like the uniforms, is deliberate — a long bar lined with red barstools, low lighting and an impressive wall of spirits.

“You feel like you are in Havana in 1958. It reminds me of ‘The Godfather Part II,’” said the showrunner. “It’s a place where you go to drink and end up eating, or go to eat and end up drinking.

2. Sanguich

“These sandwiches are phenomenal,” said Mr. Newman, of the offerings at Sanguich.

He favors the house specialty: the pan con lechon, a sandwich of shredded pork, pickled onions and garlic cilantro aioli on Cuban bread.

“I don’t know how many of these sandwiches I have left in my life. You don’t want to eat one every day or even every week at this age. But I have decided that any more that I’m ever going to have are going to come from Sanguich.”

The sandwich shop, its menu inspired by “pre-revolutionary Cuba,” has locations in Little Havana and in Little Haiti. The stars of the menu are, not surprisingly, the sandwiches, all of which have beef or pork (vegetarian options are basically milkshakes and fries). And the limited hours serve a very useful purpose, at least for Mr. Newman: “Thankfully, it closes at 6 p.m. — because I would get into horrible trouble if they were open late.”

3. Vizcaya Museum & Gardens

“It looks like something that belongs in Newport, R.I., surrounded by beautiful gardens,” said Mr. Newman of Vizcaya Museum & Gardens, a sprawling estate built as a vacation home in the early 1900s by a wealthy businessman named James Deering.

In 1953, Vizcaya, which sits on the water in Coconut Grove, officially opened as a museum. A sort of American Versailles, Vizcaya has acres of outdoor gardens, a dozen buildings inspired by Italian Renaissance and Mediterranean styles, a cafe, event spaces and, naturally, secret passageways throughout.

“There’s something kind of melancholy about it for me, like Xanadu in ‘Citizen Kane’ or the Hearst Castle — sort of monuments to oneself. But it’s beautiful,” Mr. Newman said.

Vizcaya has had many notable guests over the years, including Ronald Reagan, Pope John Paul II and Queen Elizabeth II. “As much as I appreciate the exhibits, I love to sort of wander around the gardens and get a bit lost,” Mr. Newman said. “You can look out at the bay from this Gatsby-esque house and just lose yourself. I remember liking the way that felt very much.”

4. Twenty Seven Restaurant & Bar

“I went here for the first time last night, and it was amazing — kind of this weird, strange, wonderful experience. My wife and I walked into what appeared to be a hostel. There was a guy behind a desk who was going over a bill with some backpacker, and my wife and I were like, ‘this cannot be the place.’”

In fact, 27 Restaurant is part of the Freehand Hotel, an upscale hostel a couple of blocks from the Miami Beach. “Then we’re in this pool area lit by tiki torches, and I finally asked someone, ‘Is there a restaurant here?’ Around the corner, as you got closer, you heard how alive it was,” Mr. Newman said.

The menu borrows from American South and Afro-Caribbean food. The décor is eclectic and mismatched, the tables are communal, and “the oyster mushrooms are amazing,” Mr. Newman said. “So are the shrimp dumplings. We had three orders of them.”

5. Siboney Night Club

“I’m 53, I don’t really go out anywhere anymore, but Miami has a different energy,” said Mr. Newman, whose favorite after-hours spot is Siboney Night Club in West Miami. The salsa club, open Thursdays to Saturdays from 11 p.m. to 5 a.m., is “very no frills,” he said. Its authenticity makes him a repeat visitor.

“It’s not one of those places that you would walk by it and go, ‘Oh, we’ve got to go in and see what’s going on,’” he said. “It’s entirely Latin and there’s something transportive about it.”

Follow New York Times Travel on Instagram and sign up for our weekly Travel Dispatch newsletter to get expert tips on traveling smarter and inspiration for your next vacation. Dreaming up a future getaway or just armchair traveling? Check out our 52 Places to Go in 2024 .

Open Up Your World

Considering a trip, or just some armchair traveling here are some ideas..

Italy :  Spend 36 hours in Florence , seeking out its lesser-known pockets.

Southern California :  Skip the freeways to explore the back roads between Los Angeles and Los Olivos , a 100-mile route that meanders through mountains, canyons and star-studded enclaves.

Mongolia : Some young people, searching for less curated travel experiences, are flocking to the open spaces of this East Asian nation .

Romania :  Timisoara  may be the most noteworthy city you’ve probably never heard of , offering just enough for visitors to fill two or three days.

India: A writer fulfilled a lifelong dream of visiting Darjeeling, in the Himalayan foothills , taking in the tea gardens and riding a train through the hills.

52 Places:  Why do we travel? For food, culture, adventure, natural beauty? Our 2024 list has all those elements, and more .

Advertisement

IMAGES

  1. Movie Review

    travel writer xanadu

  2. Xanadu

    travel writer xanadu

  3. Xanadu: Rethinking a misunderstood masterpiece

    travel writer xanadu

  4. ‎Xanadu on iTunes

    travel writer xanadu

  5. Xanadu

    travel writer xanadu

  6. In Xanadu: A Quest (Text Only) by William Dalrymple

    travel writer xanadu

VIDEO

  1. 🔥 Анимация в Xanadu Makadi Bay 5* #египет #travelvlog

COMMENTS

  1. In Xanadu

    In Xanadu: A Quest is a 1989 travel book by William Dalrymple. Overview In ... Eminent travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor chose In Xanadu as his book of the year in the Spectator and wrote, "William Dalrymple's In Xanadu carries us breakneck from a predawn glimmer in the Holy Sepulchre right across Asia... It is learned and comic, and a most ...

  2. Travel Writing; A critical study of William Dalrymple's " In Xanadu; A

    In Xanadu is a text that is inextricably linked to the representation of its author, both within and outside its textual boundaries. Dalrymple's construction of William as a travel writer throughout the work is pure self fashioning, as during the journey undertaken for In Xanadu he is not yet a travel writer at all.

  3. In Xanadu by William Dalrymple: 9780307948885

    Stylish, witty, and knowledgeable about everything from the dreaded order of Assassins to the hidden origins of the Three Magi, this is travel writing at its best. About In Xanadu William Dalrymple's award-winning first book: his classic, fiercely intelligent and wonderfully entertaining account of his journey across Marco Polo's 700-year ...

  4. In Xanadu

    In Xanadu is a highly acclaimed and very enjoyable travelogue about a summer trip taken by William Dalrymple, a 22 year old Cambridge University student and now famous travel writer, on a quest to trace the path of Marco Polo. The book chronicles 12,000 miles of travels, starting from the steps of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem across Asia to find Xanadu, an ancient capital of Inner Mongolia ...

  5. In Xanadu by William Dalrymple

    This is an account of a quest which took him and his companions across the width of Asia, along dusty, forgotten roads, through villages and cities full of unexpected hospitality and wildly improbable escapades, to Coleridge's Xanadu itself. At once funny and knowledgeable, In Xanadu is in the finest tradition of British travel writing.

  6. In Xanadu

    In Xanadu Synopsis. At the age of twenty-two, William Dalrymple left his college in Cambridge to travel to the ruins of Kublai Khan's stately pleasure dome in Xanadu. ... In Xanadu is in the finest tradition of British travel writing. Told with an exhilarating blend of eloquence, wit, poetry and delight, it is already established as a classic ...

  7. The Best Travel Literature of All Time

    In Xanadu (1989) - William Dalrymple. One of the travel writers greatly influenced by Chatwin was William Dalrymple, whose own quest for his first book, In Xanadu, was framed as a search for the fabled palace of Kublai Khan, Xanadu. This type of narrative has always proven to be a ready source of inspiration for some of the better modern ...

  8. In Xanadu: A Quest

    Paperback. $16.99 33 Used from $6.00 23 New from $10.94. William Dalrymple's award-winning first book: his classic, fiercely intelligent and wonderfully entertaining account of his journey across Marco Polo's 700-year-old route from Jerusalem to Xanadu, the summer palace of Kubla Khan. At the age of twenty-two, Dalrymple left his college in ...

  9. In the footsteps of Marco Polo: the journey that changed William

    Not since the 1930s has travel writing been so popular or so important. So In Xanadu came out at just the right moment, when travel writing was at its most popular. Partly as a result of this ...

  10. Amazon.com: In Xanadu eBook : Dalrymple, William: Kindle Store

    The writer is a Scotsman, a student at Cambridge, who undertakes to follow Marco Polo's route to Xanadu. Polo did it in the year 1271, Dalrymple does it in 1989. Observant, detailed, interesting---customs, and oh the people and the noise! Excellent writing style, essentially a travel book BUT a travel book par excellence!

  11. The Way to Xanadu

    The power of these works to feed the poet's imagination inspires Alexander's intriguing speculation about the value and purposeof travel writing in our own age. Endlessly entertaining and richly informative, The Way to Xanadu is an utterly original blend of travel writing and literary scholarship.

  12. In Xanadu by William Dalrymple. The travelogue I didn't know ...

    Dalrymple writes a personal diary, of his travel funded by the Cambridge University as part of his research, peppering the historical and the historic with the current day, men and women from then ...

  13. ‎In Xanadu on Apple Books

    'The future of travel writing lies in the hands of gifted authors like Dalrymple' Sara Wheeler, Independent About the author In Xanadu won the Yorkshire Post Best First Work Award and the Scottish Arts Council Spring Book Award, and was shortlisted for the John Llewelyn Rhys Prize. Dalrymple's second book, City of Djinns, won the Thomas ...

  14. In Xanadu by William Dalrymple

    Based on a journey that he took in 1986 at the fresh age of 21, it is the travel-writer-turned historian's first book. The journey narrated followed Marco Polo's journey from Jerusalem to Xanadu, and passed through Syria, Turkey, Iran, Pakistan and various regions of China, including Kashgar in the far west. Dalrymple was a student at ...

  15. To Xanadu

    A number of years ago, I read a book called "In Xanadu: A Quest," written by travel writer William Dalrymple , in which he recounts his attempt at retracing the footsteps of Marco Polo from Jerusalem to Xanadu, the summer capital of Kublai Khan (who, at that time was the emperor of China. It was one of the funniest books I'd read in a long ...

  16. Xanadu

    Xanadu. The respected historian and travel writer, John Man, tells the remarkable story of the world's most famous traveller -- Marco Polo -- and the moment when East met West for the first time. Marco Polo's journey from Venice, through Europe and most of Asia, to the court of Kublai Khan in China is one of the most audacious in history.

  17. Kubla Khan

    Kubla Khan: or A Vision in a Dream (/ ˌ k ʊ b l ə ˈ k ɑː n /) is a poem written by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, completed in 1797 and published in 1816.It is sometimes given the subtitles "A Vision in a Dream" and "A Fragment." According to Coleridge's preface to Kubla Khan, the poem was composed one night after he experienced an opium-influenced dream after reading a work describing Shangdu ...

  18. A Study the Travel Writing of William Dalrymple Include In Xanadu: a

    William Dalrymple is a popular writer and art historian. He is known for his travelogues and historical narratives. He is also very active in the field of journalism. Dalrymple's best-known works include In Xanadu A Quest (1989), City of Djinns A Year in Delhi (1993), The Age of Kali Indian Travels Encounters (1998).

  19. Xanadu: Marco Polo and Europe's Discovery of the East

    Xanadu: Marco Polo and Europe's Discovery of the East. Paperback - November 1, 2010. Respected historian and travel writer John Man tells the remarkable story of the world's most famous traveler—Marco Polo—and the moment when East met West for the first time Marco Polo's late 13th-century journey from Venice, through Europe and most of ...

  20. Travel Writing

    Travel Writing - A critical study of William Dalrymple's "In Xanadu; A Quest" - Read online for free.

  21. Xanadu: Marco Polo and Europe's Discovery of the East

    John Man. 3.38. 599 ratings76 reviews. Respected historian and travel writer John Man tells the remarkable story of the world's most famous traveler—Marco Polo—and the moment when East met West for the first time Marco Polo's late 13th-century journey from Venice, through Europe and most of Asia, to China is one of the most audacious in ...

  22. Xanadu by John Man

    The respected historian and travel writer, John Man, tells the remarkable story of the world's most famous traveller - Marco Polo - and the moment when East met West for the first time.

  23. Living at Xanadu: Ten writers muse on Joan Didion's literary legacy

    Cynthia Zarin, Ira Silverberg, Fariha Róisín, and others reflect on the reach of the iconic American voice. "It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends," Joan Didion wrote at the start of her seminal essay "Goodbye to All That." "I can remember now, with a clarity that makes the nerves in the back of my ...

  24. What to Do in Miami, According to the 'Griselda' and 'Narcos' Creator

    An after-hours salsa club, a Xanadu hiding in plain sight, the best Cuban sandwich around: These are the secrets that Miami has slowly revealed to him. Image Over the years, Eric Newman has spent ...