National Geographic Adventurer of the Year, Heather Anderson is the only woman who has completed the Appalachian, Pacific Crest, and Continental Divide National Scenic Trails each three times. This includes her historic Calendar Year Triple Crown hike in 2018 when she hiked all three of those trails in one March-November season, making her the first female to do so. As an itinerant hiker, runner, and mountaineer she has logged over 40,000 foot miles since 2003 including over a dozen thru-hikes and many ultramarathons. She is also an avid mountaineer and peakbagger working on several ascent lists in the US and abroad.
Heather Anderson’s second memoir tells the story not only of her attempt to set a Fastest Known Time on the iconic Appalachian Trail, but also delves deeply into the psychology of a driven endurance athlete and the personal growth she gains along the way.
The 2,180 miles of the AT, from Maine to Georgia, did not make it easy. Anderson contended with pouring rain, sultry humidity, biting gnats and flies, blisters, and steep grades for fifty-four days on a physically difficult, yet profoundly internal journey. Mud, Rocks, Blazes is a testament to the power of a challenging physical feat to transform a person's self-awareness and sense of self-worth. As Anderson comes to realize, “The trail has a way of answering questions you most need answered, even if you are afraid to ask.”
“I looked at the high cracked ceilings and really didn’t know who I was for about fifteen strange seconds. I wasn’t scared, I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost…I was halfway across America, at the dividing line between the East of my youth and the West of my future, and maybe that’s why it happened right there and then that strange red afternoon.”
When I read these words set the book down and stared up at my own ceiling. Never before had I read someone captured the restlessness I felt. The need to push onward, to move, to find the self that was inside me somewhere. Jack Kerouac captures the vagabond impetus like no other.
The legendary novel of freedom and the search for authenticity that defined a generation, now in a striking new Pengiun Classics Deluxe Edition
Inspired by Jack Kerouac's adventures with Neal Cassady, On the Road tells the story of two friends whose cross-country road trips are a quest for meaning and true experience. Written with a mixture of sad-eyed naivete and wild ambition and imbued with Kerouac's love of America, his compassion for humanity, and his sense of language as jazz, On the Road is the quintessential American vision of freedom and hope, a book that changed American literature and changed…
Every vagabond feels the need to walk away from who they are and start again. Hikertrash know the need to find that new start in the wild. Krakauer captures this with his incredible profile of Chris McCandless who renames himself “Supertramp.” While Chris doesn’t walk the Pacific Crest Trail, he immerses himself into wild nature with an incredible willingness to discover depths of himself that few are willing to examine.
Krakauer’s page-turning bestseller explores a famed missing person mystery while unraveling the larger riddles it holds: the profound pull of the American wilderness on our imagination; the allure of high-risk activities to young men of a certain cast of mind; the complex, charged bond between fathers and sons.
"Terrifying... Eloquent... A heart-rending drama of human yearning." —New York Times
In April 1992 a young man from a well-to-do family hitchhiked to Alaska and walked alone into the wilderness north of Mt. McKinley. He had given $25,000 in savings to charity, abandoned his car and most of his possessions, burned all…
All aspiring hikertrash have to start somewhere and Derick relates this journey with great honesty and humor. I started my vagabond life on the Appalachian Trail a decade before Derick did, but I found myself laughing in commiseration with his escapades as he learned what it means to walk across the country. Unlikely captures not only the highlights of hikertrash life, but also the lows, the drudgery, and the beautiful camaraderie that forms between people on journeys. Whether you hike or wander a different path, these themes connect for us all.
Derick Lugo had never been hiking. He certainly couldn't imagine going more than a day without manicuring his goatee. But with a job cut short and no immediate plans, this fixture of the New York comedy scene began to think about what he might do with months of free time. He had heard of the Appalachian Trail, but he had never seriously considered attempting to hike all 2,184.2 miles of it. Suddenly he found himself asking, Could he do it?
The Unlikely Thru-Hiker is the story of how a young black man from the city, unfamiliar with both the outdoors…
Wild is the quintessential journey through grief and back to self. There are a handful of experiences that unite all humans and loss is one of these threads. Cheryl weaves her narrative of grief with the powerful magic of wandering in nature. Together they illustrate just how strong our connection to the Earth and each other is.
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A powerful, blazingly honest memoir: the story of an eleven-hundred-mile solo hike that broke down a young woman reeling from catastrophe—and built her back up again.
At twenty-two, Cheryl Strayed thought she had lost everything. In the wake of her mother’s death, her family scattered and her own marriage was soon destroyed. Four years later, with nothing more to lose, she made the most impulsive decision of her life. With no experience or training, driven only by blind will, she would hike more than a thousand miles of the Pacific Crest Trail from the…
What is more truly vagabond than packing up your life and traveling abroad for a year? Elizabeth dives deep into herself by going solo and immersing herself in three cultures. Hers is the perfect illustration of rejecting societal norms and her own internal demons to find the abundant life she wants.
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OVER 15 MILLION COPIES SOLD WORLDWIDE
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'Eat, Pray, Love has been passed from woman to woman like the secret of life' - Sunday Times
'A defining work of memoir' - Sunday Telegraph
'Engaging, intelligent, and highly entertaining' - Time
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It's 3 a.m. and Elizabeth Gilbert is sobbing on the bathroom floor. She's in her thirties, she has a husband, a house, they're trying for a baby - and she doesn't want any of it.
A bitter divorce and a turbulent love affair later, she emerges battered and bewildered and realises it is time to pursue her own…
My life and work have been profoundly affected by the central circumstance of my existence: I was born into a very large military Catholic family in the United States of America. As a child surrounded by many others in the 60s, I wrote, performed, and directed family plays with my numerous brothers and sisters. Although I fell in love with a Canadian and moved to Canada, my family of origin still exerts considerable personal influence. My central struggle, coming from that place of chaos, order, and conformity, is to have the courage to live an authentic life based on my own experience of connectedness and individuality, to speak and be heard.
Trapped in her enormous, devout Catholic family in 1963, Annie creates a hilarious campaign of lies when the pope dies and their family friend, Cardinal Stefanucci, is unexpectedly on the shortlist to be elected the first American pope.
Driven to elevate her family to the holiest of holy rollers in the parish, Annie is tortured by her own dishonesty. But when “The Hands” visits her in her bed and when her sister finds herself facing a scandal, Annie discovers her parents will do almost anything to uphold their reputation and keep their secrets safe.
Questioning all she has believed and torn between her own gut instinct and years of Catholic guilt, Annie takes courageous risks to wrest salvation from the tragic sequence of events set in motion by her parents’ betrayal.
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