About the Book
In Haunted Traveller, his most personal and ambitious work, Barry Yourgrau takes the reader on a postmodern literary journey like no other. Here are forty-four fantastic episodes that together paint an imaginary memoir of one man's yearning, alienated passage through life, as written by this "odd, wild, and brilliant master of absurd anxieties" (Patrick McGrath). Think Bruce Chatwin meets Monty Python. Meets Paul Bowles meets Fellini meets Scheherazade meets The Twilight Zone. Think the moody romance of Travel itself. Haunted Traveller packs readers along on the moonstruck roaming of a lost soul searching for a childhood memento. Wander to tropical hotel rooms to hear deathbed whispers; climb to mountain graveyards where a ghost shops for a life wife; spy on stolen kisses in snowbound palaces. Voyage to lands that exist in the dreams, poetic whimsies, and troubled confessions of a man who's seen all too much.
Mixing grand gestures of travel writing with Gothic horrors, amorous fables, adventure yarns, and lamplit fairy tales. Haunted Traveller brims with Yourgrau's trademark surreal wit. With this book, he creates a lushly atmospheric and intimate masterpiece that distills the sublime imagination of his earlier work and pushes it to a new, richly poignant level. Haunted Traveller solidifies Yourgrau's place as one of the most inventive and uniquely insightful writers working today.
Skyhorse Publishing, as well as our Arcade, Yucca, and Good Books imprints, are proud to publish a broad range of books for readers interested in fiction--novels, novellas, political and medical thrillers, comedy, satire, historical fiction, romance, erotic and love stories, mystery, classic literature, folklore and mythology, literary classics including Shakespeare, Dumas, Wilde, Cather, and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.
About the Author :
Barry Yourgrau is a writer and performance artist. He is also the author of Mess: One Man's Struggle to Clean Up His House and His Act as well as A Man Jumps Out of an Airplane, Wearing Dad's Head, and The Sadness of Sex, which was adapted into a movie in which he stars. He and his work have appeared on MTV's Unplugged: Spoken Word and NPR's All Things Considered and Selected Shorts, among others. He lives in New York and Istanbul.
Review :
Praise for Haunted Traveller "Barry Yourgrau's sinuous, laconic fictions defy routine description. . . . Ultimately, his vignettes add up to a strangely sublime collection that speaks less to travel than it does to alienation--and to the restless yearnings of the human heart." --New York Times Book Review
Every once in a while you stumble on a book that so captivates you, you drop everything else you were supposed to be doing and just read and read and read. --Salon
Writing in a droll, sleight-of-hand style similar in its archness and metaphysical undercurrents to Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges . . . Yourgrau's glimmering and piquant tales are adroitly performed and sure to be gleefully received. --Booklist, starred review
Yourgrau offers a dazzling invention that delights and challenges . . . poignantly evokes the universal plight of the traveler for whom everywhere--and nowhere--is home. --Publishers Weekly
Yourgrau invites us a long for a whirlwind trip through his imagination. --Library Journal
Yourgrau reminds us that the essence of travel is to discover an aspect of ourselves we've never recognized before. --Bill Barich, author of Crazy for Rivers
Haunted Traveller transports us to the blameless region of dreaming wherein to be lost is no less than a sublime pleasure. Revel in it. --Barry Gifford, author of Wild at Heart
This is gorgeous writing that takes you to places no other American writer can find. --Mark Richard, author of Charity
Haunted Traveller is wildly inventive, vivid in language, beautifully written. --Alan Lightman, author of Einstein's Dreams
Haunted Traveller is a staggeringly inventive, almost dementedly entertaining work. --Jerry Stahl, author of Permanent Midnight
With this kinky collection, Yourgrau joins the good company of writers such as Bruno Schultz, Ital Calvino, and Maureen Owen, who traveled in the imagination through the geography of literature. --Minneapolis Star Tribune
Yourgrau's Haunted Traveller weaves together voyages full of wacky turmoil. . . . Yourgrau performs his contradictory dialogue with hilarious panache. --Village Voice
Yourgrau's fictions navigate a phantasmagoric landscape where ordinary life becomes the backdrop for strange, unexpected adventures. . . . Part dream, part travelogue, Haunted Traveller blurs the borders between reality and imagination, between the mundane and the magical. --Rain Taxi
Each absurd, alienated, and uniquely oddly charming episode is guaranteed to be unlike anything you've ever read. --Rapport (Los Angeles)
Yourgrau is one of the few people who can describe his own work as existential and postmodern without sounding pretentious. --Time Out (New York)
