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🧲 Books like this

White Sands: Experiences from the Outside World

Geoff Dyer · back to the book

What’s in it

Tap a tag: ❤ = this matters to me · tap again ✕ = don’t care · again to reset. The list below updates each time.

24 books with the same feel

Include books by the same author
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Way Off the Road

Bill Geist · 256 pages

Travel WritingEssay CollectionNonfictionDry Humor
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The Nasty Bits

Anthony Bourdain · 304 pages

Essay CollectionTravel WritingNonfictionDry Humor
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Paris, I Love You but You're Bringing Me Down

Rosecrans Baldwin · 304 pages

Travel WritingEssay CollectionNonfictionDry Humor
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Bicycle Diaries

David Byrne · 303 pages

Since the early 1980s, renowned musician and visual artist David Byrne has been riding a bike as his principal means of transportation in New York City. Two decades ago, he discovered folding bikes and started taking them with him when traveling around the world. Byrne's choice was initially made out of convenience rather than political motivation, but the more cities he saw from his bicycle, the

Travel WritingEssay CollectionNonfictionDry Humor
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Pulphead

John Jeremiah Sullivan · 392 pages

"A sharp-eyed, uniquely humane tour of America's cultural landscape--from high to low to lower than low--by the award-winning young star of the literary nonfiction world In Pulphead, John Jeremiah Sullivan takes us on an exhilarating tour of our popular, unpopular, and at times completely forgotten culture. Simultaneously channeling the gonzo energy of Hunter S. Thompson and the wit and insight o

Essay CollectionTravel WritingNonfictionDry Humor
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The Importance of Being Iceland: Travel Essays in Art

Eileen Myles · 365 pages

Poet and post-punk hero Eileen Myles has always operated in the art, writing, and queer performance scenes as a kind of observant flaneur. Myles travels the city—wandering on garbage-strewn New York streets in the heat of summer, drifting though the antiseptic malls of La Jolla, and riding in the van with Sister Spit—seeing it with a poet's eye for detail and with the consciousness that writing ab

Essay CollectionTravel WritingNonfictionArt & Design
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Paris Was Ours: Thirty-Two Writers Reflect on the City of Light

Penelope Rowlands · 279 pages

Paris is “the world capital of memory and desire,” concludes one of the writers in this intimate and insightful collection of memoirs of the city. Living in Paris changed these writers forever. In thirty-two personal essays—more than half of which are here published for the first time—the writers describe how they were seduced by Paris and then began to see things differently. They came to writ

Essay CollectionTravel WritingNonfiction
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I'm a Stranger Here Myself: Notes on Returning to America after Twenty Years Away

Bill Bryson · 381 pages

After living in Britain for two decades, Bill Bryson recently moved back to the United States with his English wife and four children (he had read somewhere that nearly 3 million Americans believed they had been abducted by aliens--as he later put it, "it was clear my people needed me"). They were greeted by a new and improved America that boasts microwave pancakes, twenty-four-hour dental-floss

Essay CollectionTravel WritingNonfictionDry Humor
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What Am I Doing Here?

Bruce Chatwin · 367 pages

Essay CollectionTravel WritingNonfiction
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Here Is New York

E.B. White · 56 pages

What is most amazing about E.B. White's "Here Is New York," This book written in 1948 says: "A single flight planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end t his island fantasy, burn the towers, crumble the bridges, turn the underground passages into lethal chambers, cremate the millions." The city is both the perfect target and the perfect demonstration of nonviolence. White says, "This i

Travel WritingEssay CollectionNonfiction
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Abbey's Road

Edward Abbey · 198 pages

Essay CollectionTravel WritingNonfiction
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Irish Journal

Heinrich Boll · 127 pages

Travel WritingEssay CollectionNonfictionDry Humor
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And the Pursuit of Happiness

Maira Kalman · 471 pages

Filled with original art and photographs by the author who is also an illustrator and designer, each chapter represents a month of Kalman's yearlong travel across the U.S. and her reflections on democracy. She starts with a celebration of Barack Obama's Presidential inauguration in Washington, D.C., continues with the month of February and Abraham Lincoln, and explores democracy and the pursuit o

Travel WritingEssay CollectionNonfictionArt & Design
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A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments

David Foster Wallace · 353 pages

A collection of stories from David Foster Wallace is occasion to celebrate. These stories -- which have been prominently serialized in Harper's, Esquire, the Paris Review, and elsewhere -- explore intensely immediate states of mind, with the attention to voice and the extraordinary creative daring that have won Wallace his reputation as one of the most talented fiction writer of his generation.Amo

Essay CollectionTravel WritingNonfictionDry Humor
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South and West: From a Notebook

Joan Didion · 126 pages

Two excerpts from never-before-seen notebooks offer insights into the author's literary mind and process and includes notes on her Sacramento upbringing, her life in the Gulf states, her views on prominent locals and her experiences during a formative "Rolling Stone" assignment.

Essay CollectionTravel WritingNonfiction
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Why I Hate Canadians

Will Ferguson · 278 pages

Essay CollectionTravel WritingNonfictionDry Humor
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State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America

Matt Weiland, Sean Wilsey · 572 pages

The editors of The Thinking Fan's Guide to the World Cup collects original writings on all fifty states by leading novelists, journalists, and essayists, in a volume that includes such examples as Anthony Bourdain on New Jersey, Dave Eggers on Illinois, and Louise Erdrich on North Dakota.

Essay CollectionTravel WritingNonfiction
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A Field Guide to Getting Lost

Rebecca Solnit · 210 pages

Rebecca Solnit investigates the nature of loss, losing and being lost. She starts with the revelation that what is totally unknown to you is usually what you most need to discover and explores how finding that unknown quantity frequently requires getting lost to begin with.

Travel WritingEssay CollectionNonfiction
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Travel WritingEssay CollectionNonfictionDry Humor
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Eiger Dreams: Ventures Among Men and Mountains

Jon Krakauer · 191 pages

Krakauer takes the reader to wonderful, awful peaks like Denali, the Eiger, Devil's Thumb, K-2 and Everest.

Essay CollectionTravel WritingNonfiction
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The Art of Travel

Alain de Botton · 256 pages

A journey through the satisfactions and disappointments of travelling. Dealing with such topics as airports, exotic carpets and mini-bars it reveals the hidden motivations, expectations and complications of our voyages into the wide world.

Essay CollectionTravel WritingNonfiction
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Dancing in Cambodia, at Large in Burma

Amitav Ghosh · 114 pages

Travel WritingEssay CollectionNonfiction
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When You Are Engulfed in Flames

David Sedaris · 321 pages

"David Sedaris's ability to transform the mortification of everyday life into wildly entertaining art," (The Christian Science Monitor) is elevated to wilder and more entertaining heights than ever in this remarkable new book. Trying to make coffee when the water is shut off, David considers using the water in a vase of flowers and his chain of associations takes him from the French countryside to

Essay CollectionTravel WritingNonfictionDry Humor
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Paris to the Moon

Adam Gopnik · 342 pages

Paris. The name alone conjures images of chestnut-lined boulevards, sidewalk cafes, breathtaking facades around every corner--in short, an exquisite romanticism that has captured the American imagination for as long as there have been Americans. In 1995, Adam Gopnik, his wife, and their infant son left the familiar comforts and hassles of New York City for the urbane glamour of the City of Light.

Essay CollectionTravel WritingNonfiction
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