Voyager: Travel Writings Audiobook (Free)

The acclaimed, award-winning novelist takes us on some of his most remarkable journeys with this revelatory assortment of travel essays that spans the globe, from the Caribbean to Scotland to the Himalayas.

Right now in his mid-seventies, Russell Banks offers indulged his wanderlust for over fifty percent a century. “Since years as a child, I’ve longed for get away, for rejuvenation, for wealth untold, for erotic and narcotic and sybaritic new begins, for high love, secret, and intrigue,” he writes within this about Voyager: Travel Writings powerful anthology. The longing for escape has used him in the “bright green islands and turquoise seas” of the Caribbean islands to peaks in the Himalayas, the Andes, and beyond.

In Voyager, Russell Banks, a lifelong explorer, stocks highlights from his travels: interviewing Fidel Castro in Cuba; motoring to a hippie reunion with college close friends in Chapel Hill, North Carolina; eloping to Edinburgh, with his fourth wife, Run after; generating a sunset orange metallic Hummer down Alaska’s Seward Highway.

In each of these remarkable essays, Banks considers his life as well as the world. In Everglades National Park this “ideal spot to time-travel,” he traces his personal timeline. “I continue back, and with increasingly clarity I see more of the place and even more of my past selves. And even more of the past of the planet as well.” Recalling his travels towards the Caribbean in the title article, “Voyager,” Banking institutions dissects his romantic relationships using the four females who would become his wives. In the Himalayas, he embarks on a different mission of self-discovery. “One climbs a hill not to overcome it, but to be lifted like this away from the planet earth up into the sky,” he explains.

Pensive, frank, gorgeous, and participating, Voyager includes the social, the personal, and the traditional, opening a path in to the core of the revered writer.