There She Goes: New Travel Writing by Women

Poet Aldegheri (Free to Go) pushes the boundaries of a “historically male-dominated genre” with this captivating anthology of travel essays by women. Extending beyond themes of conquest and superhuman endurance, entries touch on vulnerability and disenfranchisement, with Leena Rustom Nammari’s “Dispatches from a Road Less Travelled” detailing the indignities of moving through the West Bank weeks after the start of the war in Gaza (“It is a humiliating way to travel”). Fear is an undercurrent in “Attention Please,” in which Janette Ayachi escapes a violent marriage with her two small children, while motherhood is an odyssey of its own in Jemma Neville’s “From Our Own Correspondent,” which likens diary entries from her days with twin toddlers to dispatches from a foreign land. Even the more traditional adventure stories feel fresh: Anna Fleming describes getting her period while preparing to summit Mont Blanc (there is little water or privacy, and few tampons), while Lee Craigie’s “Rewriting the Hero’s Journey” offers a “radical” approach to a bike race: responding to the body’s needs and centering strength over exhaustion. Memorable and thought-provoking, the essays do valuable work in broadening what it means to explore, unpacking the complex realities “of what happens when women move through the world in their brave, scared, messy bodies.” Readers will be eager to take the trip. (Oct.)