Writing Places

Wit and Wisdom presents "Better than Snarge". A memoir of trips gone wrong, poor decisions made along the path and mighty adventures in faraway places. Written and narrated by Michael McCarthy.

Edited by the award-winning author, Niamh McAnally, Stories of Place will take you on a whirlwind journey across the globe courtesy of nine international writers whose tales span the genres of thriller, adventure, mystery, coming-of-age, LGBTQ+, young adult, and literary fiction, as well as the vast spectrum of the human experience. Each story is titled using the innovative geocode system What3Words, which uses three words to identify a precise location on Earth.

Though Frances Mayes is known for her travels, she has always sought a sense of home wherever she goes. In this poetic testament to the power of place in our lives, Mayes reflects on the idea of home, from the earliest imprint of four walls to the startling discoveries of feeling the strange ease of homes abroad, friends’ homes and even momentary homes that spark desires for other lives. Her musings are all the more poignant after so many have spent their long pandemic months at home.

Written in the irreverent style that made How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read a critical and commercial success, Pierre Bayard takes listeners on a trip around the world, giving us essential guidance on how to talk about all those fantastic places we've never been. Practical, funny, and thought provoking, How to Talk About Places You've Never Been will delight and inform armchair globetrotters and jet-setters, all while never having to leave the comfort of the living room.

Creating a unique, immersive setting one place at a time. Creating Places is a detailed how-to guide on inventing the heart of every imaginary world - places. It includes chapters on inventing planets, moons, continents, mountains, forests, deserts, bodies of water, sovereign powers, settlements, and interesting locales. Extensive, culled research on each is provided to inform your world-building decisions and understand the impact on craft, story, and audience.

The city long-adored for its medieval beauty, old-timey brasseries, and corner cafés has even more to offer today. In the last few years, a flood of new ideas and creative locals has infused a once-static, traditional city with a new open-minded sensibility and energy. Journalist Lindsey Tramuta offers detailed insight into the rapidly evolving worlds of food, wine, pastry, coffee, beer, fashion, and design in the delightful city of Paris. Tramuta puts the spotlight on the new trends and people that are making France’s capital a more whimsical, creative, vibrant, and curious place.

A hauntingly beautiful diptych of works inspired by Robert Macfarlane's travels with celebrated collaborators to two eerie corners of England. In Holloway, "a perfect miniature prose-poem" (William Dalrymple), Macfarlane, artist Stanley Donwood, and writer Dan Richards travel to Dorset, near the...

These essays—moving, engaging, and deeply personal—explore the themes of family responsibility, growing up, and growing older. As the author, a divorced single mother beginning a new life and career in her forties, delves into the details of her own situation, she illuminates universal truths about what matters most: love, fulfillment, and the pain and necessity of huge change. These pieces about a woman in midlife struggling to come into her own in a complicated world are rich in insight and written with warmth, humour, and clear-eyed, sometimes devastating, honesty.

Joyful and informative, Places I Remember: Tales, Truths, Delights from 100 Countries presents a memoir covering over 50 years of travel throughout the world. You'll find a range of unforgettable people and places through vivid personal experiences - good, bad, and often, laugh-out-loud funny.

Roger Mudd joined CBS in 1961 and rose to fame as the congressional correspondent, covering the historic Senate filibuster debate over the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Mudd was there to see Dan Rather going toe-to-toe with the Nixon White House, Marvin Kalb deciphering the State Department, Daniel Schorr bird-dogging Watergate, Lesley Stahl and Connie Chung staking out all the president's men, George Herman presiding over Face the Nation, Bob Schieffer covering the Pentagon like a police reporter.

In the middle of the night on March eleventh, 1980, the phone rang in Julia Reed’s Georgetown dorm. It was her boss at Newsweek, where she was an intern. He told her to get in her car and drive to her alma mater, the Madeira School. Her former headmistress, Jean Harris, had just shot Dr. Herman Tarnower, The Scarsdale Diet Doctor. Julia didn’t flinch. She dressed, drove to Madeira, got the story—and her first byline—and the new American Gilded Age was off and running.

Restless to leave, eager to return: this memoir in essays captures the unrelenting pull between the past and the present, between traveling the world and staying home.

In her late twenties, writer and naturalist Lucy Bryan found herself in between places. Her marriage to her first love had crumbled. Her beloved father had died of cancer. Doubt had supplanted the faith that had guided her since childhood. Uprooted and adrift, she turned to the natural world in search of meaning, connection, and a renewed sense of self.

Learning to create a unique, immersive place one podcast episode at a time. World building strategist Randy Ellefson turned his successful book series, The Art of World Building, into a popular podcast of the same name, with episodes loosely drawn from each book in the series...Ellefson breaks out in new directions while expanding on how to invent planets, continents, sovereign powers, settlements, history, maps, and more...Build better, faster.

Claire and Gary, college sweethearts, married for decades were at an impasse. They had been together forever, and started taking each other for granted. When faced with problems they would normally tackle together, they turned elsewhere and struggled to find their way home. Gary finds his biological family, Claire struggles with identity issues, and their son is forced to become an adult.

This collection brings together the best of Ruskin Bond's cameos, all beautifully imagined and crafted, inspired by people who have left a lasting impression on him. In addition, there are a host of characters culled from Bond's numerous short stories. Taken together, they constitute a...

Best Places to See Land-Based Wildlife in the United States by author Laura Gray offers an inside approach to locate fantastic wildlife throughout the United States. Animals can tell you a story of the destination, the surrounding landscape, and the climate.

It was important to me because I needed my fix of travel, my escape from the fast-paced world of the everyday. It’s not Tahiti, or Thailand, or even Hawaii - it’s Interstate 5. It’s not far away, unique, or in the slightest bit exotic. That’s just it. The secret is that it doesn’t need to be. I wear an uncontrollable dopey smile for my small victories over the ordinary.