William Stoner is born at the end of the nineteenth century into a dirt-poor Missouri farming family. Sent to the state university to study agronomy, he instead falls in love with English literature and embraces a scholar's life, far different from the hardscrabble existence he has known. And yet as the years pass, Stoner encounters a succession of disappointments: marriage into a "proper" family estranges him from...
Collects over thirty travel stories from Isabel Allende, Joyce Carol Oates, Alexander McCall Smith, and other fiction authors documenting their travels to such destinations as Malawi, San Quentin, Luxembourg, and Mumbai.