Stranger on a Train: Daydreaming and Smoking Around America

Stranger on a Train: Daydreaming and Smoking Around America

by JennyDiski (Author)

Synopsis

In spite of the fact that her idea of travel is to stay home with the phone off the hook, Jenny Diski takes a trip around the perimeter of the USA by train. Somewhat reluctantly she meets all kinds of characters, all bursting with stories to tell and finds herself brooding about the marvellously familiar landscape of America, half-known already through film and television. Like the pulse of the train over the rails, the theme of the dying pleasures of smoking thrums through the book, along with reflections on the condition of solitude and the nature of friendship and memories triggered by her past times in psychiatric hospitals. Cutting between her troubled teenaged years and contemporary America, the journey becomes a study of strangers, strangeness and estrangement - from oneself, as well as from the world.

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More Information

Format: Paperback
Pages: 288
Edition: New e.
Publisher: Virago
Published: 15 Jan 2004

ISBN 10: 1860499953
ISBN 13: 9781860499951
Book Overview: * Author PR activity to include media interviews and appearances at literature festivals * Review coverage * Submitted for trade promotions * Reading copies available * Advertising campaign in the literary press I.e. Granta, London Review of Books and Waterstone's Books Quarterly
Prizes: Winner of Thomas Cook Travel Book Award 2003 and Joe Ackerley Prize 2003. Shortlisted for Thomas Cook Travel Book Award 2003.

Media Reviews
Her writing is sensitive, sincere and sparkling. * Morning Star *
(Diski's) near-erotic musings on the dreaded weed almost made me want to take up smoking again. And that's saying something. * Irish Times *
Beautifully written * Times *
Author Bio
Jenny Diski was born in 1947 in London where she has lived most of her life. She recently moved to Cambridge. She is the author of eight novels and an acclaimed memoir and her journalism has appeared in the Mail on Sunday, the Observer and the London Review of Books, amongst others.