On this day in 1973 Paul Theroux departed on the 15:30 from London's Victoria Station for Paris, the Orient Express, and the twenty-nine other trains that would take him on the fourteen-week journey documented in The Great Railway Bazaar. This was the first of Theroux's travel books, and decades later it is still on many Top Ten lists for the genre. Theroux himself keeps moving, and writing: in a recent interview for his recent anthology of travel articles, Fresh Air Fiend (2000), he said he continues to take at least a half-dozen trips a year, as he has done for 35 years. His fiction, too, can borrow from the real travels and traveler ... FULL STORY »
