Travel, associated as it is with strangeness, marvels, and excitement, has always proved an irresistible subject for writers. The Oxford Book of Travel Stories brings together some of the best short fiction on this most exhilarating of subjects from writers as diverse as Anthony Trollope, Edith Wharton, Ring Larner, William Trevor, Sylvia Townsend Warner, John Cheever, Beryl Bainbridge, and V. S. Pritchett. Readers of this anthology will be able to revel in the atmosphere of nineteenth-century Palestine, the Riviera of the 1920s, or a botanical tour of Greece. There are stories set in far distant locations - China, Australia - and others closer to home, such as Benedict Kiely's entrancing `A Journey to the Seven Streams'. Most are high-spirited, in keeping with the theme, some are wonderfully funny and one or two productively unsettling, such as Flannery O'Connor's `A Good Man is Hard to Find'. Some deal with the journey itself, and encounters on train or boat; others see travel as a literal rite of passage, an escape or a sudden growing-up. All of them illustrate, in various ways, how travel has to do with stimulus, enrichment, and a sense of achievement - `Not fare well,' as T. S. Eliot has it. `but fare forward, voyagers'. This book is intended for readers of nineteenth- and twentieth-century fiction, anthology-buyers, anyone interested in travel writing/literature, holidaymakers
