Walking Stories

A beautiful hardcover anthology of stories about traveling on foot, including both fiction and nonfiction by a wide-ranging mix of classic and contemporary writers, from Austen, Dickens, and Tolstoy to Bill Bryson, Robin Wall Kimmerer, and Robert Macfarlane

This inviting anthology gathers famous fictional rambles from the likes of Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Leo Tolstoy, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf, and mixes them with dramatic true stories of remarkable walks from John Muir, Dorothy Wordsworth, Henry David Thoreau, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Bill Bryson, Robert Macfarlane, and more.

The act of walking inspires a dizzying variety of stories, from Bill Bryson's comic A Walk in the Woods to M. R. James's tale of a ghost cursed to wander forever, and from the thrilling true account of a woman who escaped from an Auschwitz death march to a dreamy tale by Anais Nin about wandering in the labyrinth of memory. Here are comic stories and love stories, moments of adventure and of observation, of sleep walking and of mental travelling, of strolling and of hiking, all set into glorious motion by a diverse array of great writers past and present.

The handy-size Pocket Classics format--halfway between the Pocket Poets trim size and the standard EML trim--is a perfect gift or reading size. Everyman's Library continues to pursue the highest standards, with classically designed books printed on acid-free paper, in full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and full-color jackets.FIONA STAFFORD is a professor of English literature at Oxford University. The author of many books, including a biography of Jane Austen, she also wrote and presented the highly acclaimed "The Meaning of Trees" for BBC Radio 3's The Essay. Her book The Long, Long Life of Trees, published by Yale University Press in 2017, was a Sunday Times Nature Book of the Year, and she is the editor of the Everyman's Library Pocket Classic anthology Stories of Trees, Woods, and the Forest.