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Wonder Travels

Book cover for Wonder Travels showing a small figure in silhouette walking across sand dune ridges.

With no more than a cell phone number, Barkan travels to Morocco to find his wife’s lover and confront his own past.

Can we ever really know another person? When, after fifteen years of marriage, his wife has an affair with a man she meets on the beach in Morocco, writer Josh Barkan grapples with this question. In this fearless, breathtakingly candid memoir, he maps a painful odyssey from New York to El Paso to the Apache Kid Wilderness to Mexico City, where he falls in love with a painter who begins to heal him. But two years after his wife’s affair, questions still haunt him. Why did she betray him, and with whom? With no more than a cell phone number, Barkan travels to Morocco to find his wife’s lover and confront his own past. Wonder Travels marks the arrival of an important new voice in memoir.

For sale at Roundaboutpress.com.
Josh Barkan
Written by
Josh Barkan

Josh Barkan won the Lightship International Short Story Prize and was runner-up for the Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction, the Paterson Fiction Prize, and the Juniper Prize for Fiction. He is the recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and his writing has appeared in Esquire. He received his B.A. from Yale University and his M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He has taught writing at Harvard, Boston University, NYU, Hollins University, and the International Writing Program at The University of Iowa.

His books include Before Hiroshima: The Confession of Murayama Kazuo and Other Stories; Blind Speed: a novel; Wonder Travels: a memoir; and Mexico: stories (Hogarth/Penguin Random House). Mexico was selected as one of the five best story collections of 2017 by Library Journal, after receiving excellent reviews from The New York Times, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Huffington Post, LitHub, and a variety of others. Barkan lives in Boston with the writer Jennifer Haigh.

Josh Barkan Written by Josh Barkan