Try to Get Lost - (River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Prize) by Joan Frank (Paperback)

About the Book

"Try to Get Lost is a bold, engaging disquisition on the perils and promises of travel: both cranky and wise, worldly and cultivated, humorous and rueful, its every sentence sparkles. All in all, it is thoroughly entertaining, a sophisticated pleasure."--Phillip Lopate, author of A Mother's Tale

Book Synopsis

Finalist for the 2020 Big Other Book Award for Nonfiction

Through the author's travels in Europe and the United States, Try to Get Lost explores the quest for place that compels and defines us: the things we carry, how politics infuse geography, media's depictions of an idea of home, the ancient and modern reverberations of the word "hotel," and the ceaseless discovery generated by encounters with self and others on familiar and foreign ground. Frank posits that in fact time itself may be our ultimate, inhabited place--the "vastest real estate we know," with a "stunningly short" lease.

Review Quotes

"Try to Get Lost is a bold, engaging disquisition on the perils and promises of travel: both cranky and wise, worldly and cultivated, humorous and rueful, its every sentence sparkles. All in all, it is thoroughly entertaining, a sophisticated pleasure."--Phillip Lopate, author of A Mother's Tale

"Try to Get Lost is superb travel literature. It might also be one of the best memoirs you'll read this year."--Bob Wake, Coffee Spew

"A unique, entertaining, thoughtful, and thought-provoking blend of essay-formatted travelogue and observational commentaries, Try to Get Lost: Essays on Travel and Place is an extraordinary and highly recommended addition to both community and academic library collections."--Susan Bethany, Midwest Book Review

"Filled with wit, soul, and insight, each of the essays in this radiant collection offers not only a layered and revelatory portrait of the places that enchant and haunt Frank--from Paris to Florence to her hometown of Phoenix with its many ghosts--but also a profound meditation on the possibility of discovery, the inevitability of loss, and the power of both to unmake and remake us."--Jessie Chaffee, author of Florence in Ecstasy: A Novel

"Frank's rich, imagery-driven prose lends immediacy to her observations. This is a perfect book for readers to take on their travels, even if they're only going as far as the armchair."--Publishers Weekly

"Her smart, surprising, irreverent travel essays will give you wanderlust."--People Magazine

"Joan Frank animates her loving and irreverent essays with a vital, unspoken question: How do the human tendencies to idealize, project, rank, divide, and dismiss get in the way of reading the world with accuracy, with complexity? Try to Get Lost is an ongoing act of awe that gives itself permission to roll its eyes now and then. It's necessary. It's brilliant."--Paul Lisicky, author of The Narrow Door: A Memoir of Friendship

"More than once [Joan Frank] refers to Shirley Hazzard, and I felt, reading Frank, what I feel reading Hazzard, an inclination not to turn the pages to see what happens next but to dwell on the page, to linger in the evocation of scents, vistas, and emotions. Her observations are precise, witty, charming even at their crankiest. . . . Joan Frank is a vastly compelling and lyrical guide."--Elizabeth Bales Frank, Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction

"Philosophical, sophisticated literary forays that are a pleasure to dwell in."--Kirkus Reviews, starred review

"These essays soar when the writer as thinker and the writer as traveler--in the sense of a person moving deliberately through the world--most wholly converge."--Richard Scott Larson, Colorado Review

"Whether sparkling with enthusiasm or turning downright curmudgeonly, the essays of Try to Get Lost record the ups and downs of travel with wit, insight, and unfailing honesty."--Foreword Reviews

"Wry and emotionally powerful."--Diane Peterson, Santa Rosa Press Democrat