FSEM 100: The Spirit of Travel

Southern Bound represents a running conversation on books, writers, and literary travel written for the Mobile Press-Register Books page from 1995 to 2011 by John S. Sledge. The collection includes more than one hundred of the best pieces culled from Sledge's total output of approximately seven hundred columns.

Dust Tracks on a Road is the bold, poignant, and funny autobiography of novelist, folklorist, and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston, one of American literature's most compelling and influential authors. Dust Tracks on a Road is Hurston's personal story, told in her own words.

This classic coming-of-age novel, winner of the Lippincott Fiction Prize for Young Novelists in 1954, is a deliberately comic portrayal of "Mobile madness," a malady specific to the Gulf Coast but recognizable by all. Eugene Walter's novel is about a young man from a small central Alabama town who goes south of the "salt line" to Mobile to work in a bank and study law.

In 1977 David Foster took to the woods of New England to build a cabin with his own hands. Along with a few tools he brought a copy of the journals of Henry David Thoreau. Foster was struck by how different the forested landscape around him was from the one Thoreau described more than a century earlier. The sights and sounds that Thoreau experienced on his daily walks...

From the author of The Ice Soldier, comes a real-life adventure among the fjords and icy mountains of Norway. Certain geographies speak to people. We are awed by mountains, challenged by the ocean, haunted by the bleakness of deserts. The effect of landscape on human consciousness is at the heart of novelist Paul Watkins's exhilarating travel story. Long bewitched by the stark beauty of the Scandinavian Alps, Watkins sets off among the ice-clad peaks and dark fjords of the arctic with only a tent and rucksack. On the way, he stops at rustic inns, follows the paths of other solitary travelers, navigates the punishing weather, and confronts the magisterial presence of the past among these mountains--a journey that makes for one of our finest accounts of the life and the land in the frozen north.

From fish soup to caipirinha, the culinary traditions of Rio de Janeiro come alive in this rich and sumptuous tour of its people and the foods they cook, eat, love, and enjoy. In the last four centuries of its history, the inhabitants of Rio de Janeiro created a lifestyle that is unique and has been much admired ...