Though the best American writers live everywhere now, a popular fiction persists: our strongest literary voices are strictly bi-coastal ones. "Barnstorm sets out to disprove that cliche and to undermine another one as well: the sense of regional fiction as something quaint, slightly regressive, and full of local color. The stories in this collection capture our global reality with a ruthless, unaffected voice. Lorrie Moore's "The Jewish Hunter" is a dark romance that's by turns cynical and guileless. Mack Friedman catches the smoking feel of first love in his "Setting the Lawn on Fire," and...

There are weekend vacations, quick getaways, and overnight jaunts. But in this border-hopping anthology of travel memoir and fiction, every trip is a big one, as an advance guard of adventurous writers both seasoned names and fresh voices scatter across the globe, face the pure euphoria and sheer anxiety of travel, and survive a lot of very fast living. Reviving a time before the travel narrative devolved into puny 10-best lists, these writers don t get sidetracked by shopping sprees, restaurant tips, or thread-counts. Told with verve, their odysseys remind us, instead, of the larger lures...