edited by Lavinia Spalding

The Best Women’s Travel Writing, Volume 12

I'm so happy to announce that the newest volume of the anthology I edit, The Best Women's Travel Writing, is available now! You can find it at all the usual places--including directly from the publishers, Travelers' Tale (at the link below), and also from your favorite local independent bookstore! Here are some details...

“In story after story,” wrote Andrew McCarthy for The New York Times (about Volume 11), “the refreshing absence of bluster and bravado, coupled with the optimism necessary for bold travel, create a unifying narrative that testifies to the personal value and cultural import of leaving the perceived safety of home and setting out into the wider world.”

The essays in Volume 12 are equally refreshing and bold, exploring diverse themes and locations. The 34 contributors—who include Susan Orlean, Peggy Orenstein, Faith Adiele, Sally Kohn, Ann Leary, Rahawa Haile, Mathangi Subramanian, and Alison Singh Gee—tell of places like Azerbaijan, Bhutan, Colombia, Finland, Greece, Indonesia, Japan, Mexico, Nepal, Peru, Spain, and Tanzania, with stories compelling and complicated, adventurous and quiet, somber and hilarious, heartbreaking and heartwarming.

The Best Women’s Travel Writing, Volume 12, edited by Lavinia Spalding and illustrated by Colette Hannahan, celebrates the transformative truths that emerge when we cross borders, embrace the unfamiliar, create connections, and learn more about ourselves.

In this anthology, you’ll …

• Learn to survive in the polar regions of Canada

• Witness an amateur autopsy in Ireland

• Get chloroformed, robbed, read to, and propositioned in Italy

• Ride a donkey named Shakira on the dusty trails of Petra

• Explain American reality TV to a bewildered bunch in Bolivia

• Fear for your life on a stormy Adriatic Sea

• Settle a thirteen-year debt in Cuba

• Track one of the world’s most elusive animals in India

• Travel the world on stolen plane tickets

…and much more!

Publisher: Travelers’ Tales

Publication Date: November 24, 2020

$19.95, paperback

ISBN-10: 1609521897

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This Immeasurable Place: Food and Farming from the Edge of Wilderness

"One of the best books of 2017" (NPR's "On Point")

Recipes from Hell's Backbone Grill

Blake Spalding, Jennifer Castle, and Lavinia Spalding

This Immeasurable Place: Food and Farming from the Edge of Wilderness

Announcing the new cookbook from Hell's Backbone Grill, now available!

This Immeasurable Place, which I co-wrote with my sister Blake Spalding and my soul-sister Jen Castle, is the long-awaited second cookbook from Hell's Backbone Grill and Farm in Boulder, Utah. It continues the inspiring story of how two women—chef-co-owners Spalding and Castle—started their award-winning, Buddhist-based, farm-to-table organic restaurant in a remote, tiny, traditionally Mormon town on the edge of the magnificent, now-threatened Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. Filled with seventy-some new recipes, gorgeous images by world-famous photographer Ace Kvale, and stories of the restaurant, organic farm, and town, This Immeasurable Place is much more than a cookbook. It's a food-justice primer, a guide to eating consciously, and a meditation on connecting community to land and table.

Published in late November, This Immeasurable Place was named one of the best books of 2017 on NPR's On Point and immediately sold through its first print run—and now it’s available again!

Here's what people are saying about it.

“The wisdom found in the pages of this beautiful and surprising book is immeasurable. It’s wisdom from the edge, from one of the most glorious hidden kitchens there is.... Land, food, family, stewardship, and spirit all course through these tempting, gorgeous pages. A book that feeds us on so many levels.” -- Davia Nelson, NPR’s Kitchen Sisters

"... Filled with remarkable recipes and essays, it breathed life back into my radical, sometimes flagging hope for humanity, and is as inspiring as it is mouthwatering. We need this book now more than ever.” -- Elissa Altman, author of Poor Man’s Feast

“Blake Spalding and Jen Castle pioneered farm-to-table cooking, creating the Rocky Mountain West’s first women-chef-owned restaurant with full-scale farm. The authors lay out the seasons of the restaurant with humor, gentleness, and joy, but underpin it with their steely, unflinching resolve. Buy this as a cookbook and a keepsake of the truly immeasurable spirit of this community and the land.” -- Cheryl Alters Jamison, four-time James Beard award winner

"Blake Spalding and Jen Castle are alchemists, truly changing the world through their hands, their hearts, their farm, their food. In community, everything is possible.Theirs is a leadership of love." -- Terry Tempest Williams

"As this book shows, horizon and history can’t be separated from the majesty of what we grow and prepare. Among hallowed lands, creators Jen Castle and Blake Spalding channel a culinary spirituality, and through these beautiful pages, the warmth and love abiding at Hell’s Backbone Grill." -- Jacki Lyden, former NPR host

"Written in the shadow of the magnificent, now-threatened Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, this book tells of the sanctity of place and the sustenance provided in the tiny, traditionally Mormon town of Boulder, Utah, by Buddhist-principled chef-restaurateurs Blake Spalding and Jen Castle at their award-winning Hell's Backbone Grill. Filled with remarkable recipes and essays, it breathed life back into my radical, sometimes flagging hope for humanity, and is as inspiring as it is mouthwatering. We need this book now more than ever.” ”

-- Elissa Altman, author of Poor Man's Feast

Ms. Magazine: “Politics is on the Menu at Hell’s Backbone Grill”

2017 INDIES Book of the Year Finalist in Travel (Foreword Reviews)

True Stories from Around the World

Edited by Lavinia Spalding

Introducing Volume 11 of the award-winning anthology, The Best Women’s Travel Writing, published by Travelers’ Tales. The 31 true travel stories in this year’s collection are, as always, wildly diverse in theme and location—they are compelling and complicated, poignant and scary, exciting and irreverent, adventurous and quiet, beautiful and hilarious, romantic and solitary, heartwarming and heartbreaking. They tell of places like California and Cuba, Switzerland and Singapore, Iran and Iceland, Montana and Mexico and Mongolia and Mali, our own back yards and some of the farthest, most extreme corners of the world. They are the personal stories we can't help but collect when we travel, stories of reaching out to embrace the unfamiliar and creating cross-cultural connections while learning more about ourselves as human beings.

In The Best Women's Travel Writing, Volume 11, you'll:

-- go scuba diving with sharks in Palau

-- cook for Syrian refugees in Greece

-- be the first American to play pro basketball in the Czech Republic

-- anger a nun in Ethiopia

-- go whitewater rafting on the Nile in Uganda.

-- help slaughter a pig in Hungary

-- realize your limits of filial piety in Singapore

-- seek healing at the hands of a witchdoctor in Mexico

-- feast on rancid food in Iceland

-- avoid hypothermia by spooning in Mongolia

-- fall in love in Nepal

... and much, much more.

“In story after story, the refreshing absence of bluster and bravado, coupled with the optimism necessary for bold travel, create a unifying narrative that testifies to the personal value and cultural import of leaving the perceived safety of home and setting out into the wider world.””

The New York Times

True Stories From Around The Globe

Edited by Lavinia Spalding

The Best Women’s Travel Writing, Volume 10

Edited by Lavinia Spalding

Available for pre-order now!

“Tell me,” poet Mary Oliver once wrote, “what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” Oliver’s quote opens the The Best Women’s Travel Writing, Volume 10: True Stories from Around the World. And to answer the question, thirty celebrated and emerging writers invite you to ride shotgun as they travel the globe to discover new places, people, and facets of themselves. The essays are as diverse as the destinations, the common thread being fresh, compelling storytelling that will make you laugh, weep, wish you were there, or thank your lucky stars you weren’t. The Best Women’s Travel Writing speaks to the reasons why we travel—and how travel changes our lives.

In The Best Women’s Travel Writing, Volume 10: True Stories from Around the World, you’ll:

· Study the ancient art of belly dancing in Egypt

· Go day-drinking with a sea captain in Croatia

· Scuba dive through an underground cave in Mexico

· Run from massive exploding balloons in Burma

· Embed with the military in Afghanistan

· Experience a different kind of time in Argentina

· Go dogsledding in Finland

· Confront heartache, pain, and a deadly creature in Indonesia

· Negotiate with smugglers in Mongolia

· Marry a stranger at Burning Man

... and much, much more.

By Edith Wharton, introduction by Lavinia Spalding

A Motor-Flight Through France

A trailblazer among American women at the turn of the century, Edith Wharton set out in the newly invented "motor-car" to explore the cities and countryside of France. As the Whartons embark on three separate journeys through the country in 1906 and 1907, accompanied first by Edith’s brother, Harry Jones, and then by Henry James, Edith is enamored by the freedom that this new form of transport has given her. With a keen eye for architecture and art, and the engrossing style that would later earn her a Pulitzer Prize in fiction, Wharton writes about places that she previously “yearned for from the windows of the train."

Now published for the first time as an illustrated eBook with photographs reproduced directly from the 1908 first edition, and newly introduced by travel writer Lavinia Spalding, the Restless Books edition of A Motor-Flight Through France will inspire current and future generations of readers and adventurers.

"Those who have been charmed with Mrs. Wharton's novels will not be disappointed by her venture into the unfamiliar role of a travel writer." ”

New York Times, 1908

 eBook

The Best Women’s Travel Writing, Volume 9

Voted Top 10 Books for the Female Adventurist by Women's Adventure magazine

True Stories From Around The Globe

Edited by Lavinia Spalding

The Best Women’s Travel Writing, Volume 9

Anyone whose passport has been stamped a few times knows the surest method of keeping the travel fire alive: by reading and telling stories from the road, passing them along like a torch in a relay race.

This title is the ninth in the The Best Women’s Travel Writing series, presenting stimulating, inspiring, and uplifting adventures from women who have traveled to the ends of the earth to discover new places, peoples, and facets of themselves. The common threads connecting these stories are a female perspective and fresh, compelling storytelling to make the reader laugh, weep, wish she were there, or be glad she wasn’t. The points of view and perspectives are global, and themes are as eclectic as in all of our books, including stories that encompass spiritual growth, hilarity and misadventure, high adventure, romance, solo journeys, stories of service to humanity, family travel, and encounters with exotic cuisine.

In The Best Women’s Travel Writing, Volume 9, readers will:

Featuring stories by Holly Morris, Marcia DeSanctis, Apricot Anderson Irving, Laura Fraser, Amanda Jones, and Laura Resau.

  • Tangle with snakes and alligators in Bangladesh
  • Chase tornadoes with Chinese celebrities
  • Dodge fireballs while half-naked in Ecuador
  • Get stuck in the mud by the Ganges in India
  • Hunt frogs in a Louisiana bayou
  • Get cheerfully deported from South Africa
  • Be transformed by a Mexican revolution
  • Survive close encounters with rhinos in Namibia
  • Experience life under niqab in Egypt
  • Climb a volcano during a hailstorm in Rwanda
  • Find love in a tree house in Laos…and much more.

The Best Women’s Travel Writing, Volume 8

Winner: ForeWord Book of the Year Honorary Mention, 2013

True Stories From Around The World

Edited by Lavinia Spalding

The Best Women’s Travel Writing, Volume 8

Any woman whose passport has been stamped a few times knows the surest method of keeping her travel fire alive: by reading and telling stories from the road, passing them along like a torch in a relay race.

From Travelers’ Tales comes The Best Women’s Travel Writing, Volume 8: True Stories from Around the World—the eighth collection in the annual best-selling, award-winning series that invites readers to ride shotgun alongside intrepid female nomads as they travel the world to discover new places, people, and facets of themselves. The stories in this year’s edition are as diverse as the geographic locations, the common thread being fresh, compelling storytelling from a woman’s perspective aimed at making readers laugh, weep, wish they were there, or be glad they weren’t.

In The Best Women's Travel Writing, Volume 8, readers will:

  • Fend off angry bulls on a mountaintop in Kyrgyzstan
  • Start a new life in a boat on the Ganges
  • Climb the Great Wall with a 9-month-old and a 91-year-old
  • Battle it out with an alter ego in a jungle in Mexico
  • Learn about survival in a slum in Rio de Janeiro
  • Walk the Camino de Santiago from France to Spain
  • Find romance in a strip club in Oman and a boat in Belize
  • Discover family in Sicily, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Zambia

 eBook

The Best Women’s Travel Writing 2011

A 2011 ForeWord Book of the Year finalist

True Stories From Around The World

Edited by Lavinia Spalding

The Best Women’s Travel Writing 2011

Since publishing A Woman’s World in 1995, Travelers’ Tales has been the recognized leader in women’s travel literature, and with the launch of the annual series The Best Travel Writing in 2004, the obvious next step was an annual collection of the best women’s travel writing of the year. This title is the seventh in an annual series—The Best Women’s Travel Writing—that presents inspiring and uplifting adventures from women who have traveled to the ends of the earth to discover new places, peoples, and facets of themselves.

In The Best Women's Travel Writing 2011, readers will:

  • Have lunch with a mobster in Japan and drinks with an IRA member in Ireland
  • Learn the secrets of flamenco in Spain and the magic of samba in Brazil
  • Deliver a trophy for best testicles in a small town in rural Serbia
  • Fall in love while riding a camel through the Syrian Desert
  • Ski a first descent of over 5,000 feet in Northern India
  • Discover the joy of getting naked in South Korea
  • Leave it all behind to slop pigs on a farm in Ecuador...and much more.

 eBook

Writing Away

Named one of the best travel books of 2009 (Los Angeles Times)

A Creative Guide to Awakening the Journal-Writing Traveler

Writing Away

“Whenever we travel, all that we experience vanishes far too easily, a victim of flawed memory. In WRITING AWAY, Lavinia Spalding has given travelers a witty, profound, and accessible exploration of the hows and whys of keeping a journal. Novices and veterans alike will find inspiration and fresh ideas on every page, along with practical suggestions to bring out the best writer in anyone. Spalding seems to have read everybody who set pen to paper while on the move, and her narrative is laced with their wisdom and her own hardheaded yet searching advice. Best of all, she knows that the “memoir” has grown ever more diverse wings. At once a worthy addition to the literature of travel and the psychology of writing, it is also a handy, encouraging toolbox. Buy two copies—one to meditate on at home, and another to dogear, underline, and carry alongside your own journal en route.”

— Anthony Weller, author of The Siege of Salt Cove and Days and Nights on the Grand Trunk Road: Calcutta to Khyber

“Spalding doesn’t just give you ideas for keeping a travel journal— she makes a convincing case for why keeping a travel journal is important, and how this personal writing ritual can deepen your journey in unexpected ways. I recommend this book for anyone who loves travel and endeavors to do it mindfully.”

— Rolf Potts, author of Vagabonding and Marco Polo Didn’t Go There

“Writing is a sacred and an irreverent art. As such, Spalding reminds us to journey conscientiously, to arrive awakened and to write with all our hearts. This is a beautifully vital antidote to the frenetic buzz of blogging and texting, to be savored and shared.”

— Alexandra Fuller, author of Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight and The Legend of Colton H. Bryant

 eBook

With a Measure of Grace

Now in its fourth printing

The Stories and Recipes of a Small Town Restaurant

With a Measure of Grace

With a Measure of Grace recounts with sensitivity and wit the tale of a women-owned, Buddhist-based restaurant becoming a community anchor in a small Mormon town. Within the book's 176 beautiful, color-photographed pages, former backcountry caterers and professional river chefs Blake Spalding and Jen Castle share their struggles and successes as the co-owners of Hell's Backbone Grill. Spalding and Castle began with the goal to meld their ideas of place-based, seasonally appropriate cuisine, right livelihood, environmental ethics and social and community responsibility into a restaurant they would operate with compassion, generosity, loving kindness and grace. They were unaware at the time that given the unusual circumstances of their venture, this plan would be the restaurant's only chance of survival.

Located in the heart of the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, Boulder, Utah, was the last town in the nation to receive year-round mail by mule train. Today it has no stoplight, cell phone service, ATM, grocery store or medical facilities. But it has Zagat-rated Hell's Backbone Grill which, despite all odds, has won the acclaim of national and international media. Sixty-five favorite recipes accompany charming anecdotes, old-fashioned rural wisdom and introductions to captivating local characters, making With a Measure of Grace a warm, earthy, and unforgettable read.

A remarkable book that celebrates a remarkable restaurant in a scenically stunning area of Utah. Few restaurants reflect a sense of place and purpose as fully as this, and even fewer can capture that spirit on the pages of a book. Read their extraordinary story, come to know the farmers and friends who help them succeed, and then recreate and share their simply inspiring food at home”

Bill Jamison, three-time James Beard award-winning cookbook author

Yoga Journal: “Flavor of Fall”