Haunted Traveller ─ An Imaginary Memoir

In Haunted Traveller, his most personal and ambitious work, Barry Yourgrau takes the reader on a postmodern literary journey like no other. Here are forty-four fantastic episodes that together paint an imaginary memoir of one man's yearning, alienated passage through life, as written by this odd, wild, and brilliant master of absurd anxieties” (Patrick McGrath).

Think Bruce Chatwin meets Monty Python. Meets Paul Bowles meets Fellini meets Scheherazade meetsThe Twilight Zone. Think the moody romance of Travel itself. Haunted Traveller packs readers along on the moonstruck roaming of a lost soul searching for a childhood memento. Wander to tropical hotel rooms to hear deathbed whispers; climb to mountain graveyards where a ghost shops for a life wife; spy on stolen kisses in snowbound palaces. Voyage to lands that exist in the dreams, poetic whimsies, and troubled confessions of a man who's seen all too much.

Mixing grand gestures of travel writing with Gothic horrors, amorous fables, adventure yarns, and lamplit fairy tales.Haunted Traveller brims with Yourgrau's trademark surreal wit. With this book, he creates a lushly atmospheric and intimate masterpiece that distills the sublime imagination of his earlier work and pushes it to a new, richly poignant level.Haunted Traveller solidifies Yourgrau's place as one of the most inventive and uniquely insightful writers working today.

Barry Yourgrau is a writer and performance artist. He is also the author ofMess: One Man’s Struggle to Clean Up His House and His Act as well as A Man Jumps Out of an Airplane,Wearing Dad’s Head, and The Sadness of Sex, which was adapted into a movie in which he stars. He and his work have appeared on MTV’sUnplugged: Spoken Word and NPR’s All Things Considered and Selected Shorts, among others. He lives in New York and Istanbul.