Try to get lost Essays on travel and place

"Place is identity, style, faith, cosmology" notes fiction writer Frank (All the News I Need) in this collection of 16 scintillating essays on travels that map psychological interiors as much as they do geographic landscapes. "Cake-Frosting Country" is a delightful memoir of Frank's many sojourns in France, and the episodic "In Case of Firenze" tracks the highlights and disappointments of an extended stay in Florence. Frank universalizes her experiences as a traveler in essays such as "Shake Me Up, Judy," about the anxieties travelers must overcome to make a trip, but she also reminds the reader that every trip is personal in the book's most poignant selections: "Cave of the Iron Door," about her return to her childhood home in Arizona, where her mother committed suicide, and "Little Traffic Light Men," in which a trivial mishap during a visit to Germany triggers a devastating memory of the death of her sister. Frank's rich, imagery-driven prose lends immediacy to her observations. This is a perfect book for readers to take on their travels, even if they're only going as far as the armchair. (Feb.)

A gathering of honest, luminous essays on home and travel."Place is identity, style, faith, cosmology," writes Frank (All the News I Need, 2017, etc.) in her latest book, the winner of the River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Prize. From this assured, thoughtful view, the author reveals how traveling as an older adult has brought shifting perspectives. In a piquant opening essay, Frank considers First-World complaints on the inconvenience of going anywhere paired with the still-held romantic belief in travel's worth. A humorous piece on shopping for the right bag morphs into memories of childhood, linking present and past through ideas of containment, organization, and portability. The sights of Firenze, Italy, inspire separate impressions that show the city as a place both marred and upheld by tourism. Frank skillfully uses the ordinary aspects of traveling to segue into wide-ranging insights on belonging, longing, and home, with occasional familiar laments. These include the embarrassing behavior of Americans and timely comments on the current Trumpian moment ("when surroundings dazzle, Blue-leaning humans romanticize. We assume that a landscape's loveliness seeps into its inhabitants"). It's the autobiographical essays, though, that linger the most. The aching standout, "Cave of the Iron Door," features a return to the author's hometown, Phoenix. Frank overlays a familiar yet alien, desert landscape with memories of her parents' strained marriage. The nostalgic, elegiac movement from childhood magic to hindsight about her mother's isolation in the 1950s is heartbreaking, and the essay culminates in her mother's death from a barbiturate overdose. For all its attentiveness to beauty and loss, this wise and humorous collection is also a moving record of anticipation and expectation. Each place, taken on its own terms, yields up its own flavors and character, but everyone is bound by one eloquent fact: "time is the vastest real estate we know."Philosophical, sophisticated literary forays that are a pleasure to dwell in. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.