A Trance After Breakfast: And Other Passages

A collection of lyrical travel writings from celebrated writer and NPR commentator Alan Cheuse.

Along with luggage and tickets, we always travel with that which it is impossible to leave behind: ourselves, our spirits, our souls. By definition the best travel writing carries us on a soul-journey, the sort of trip that dramatizes how the heart learns about its place in the world.

In A Trance After Breakfast, poetic wanderer and novelist (To Catch the Lightning) Alan Cheuse has crafted a collection that masterfully exceeds such standards. He lures the reader around the world, from Bali and New Zealand to Mexico and back home again to his native New Jersey, making the foreign familiar and the familiar slightly foreign.

Collected from such celebrated publications as Gourmet, the Antioch Review, and the San Diego Reader, the dispatches in A Trance After Breakfast will enchant, captivate, and transport readers.

Novelist, essayist, and story writer Alan Cheuse has been described as "The Voice of Books on NPR." He has written four novels, including the recent To Catch the Lightning, and a pair of novellas. He is also the editor of Seeing Ourselves: Great Early American Short Stories and co-editor of Writers' Workshop in a Book. He teaches writing at George Mason University.