Kingdoms in the Air

“Whether he’s in Cuba, Mozambique, or attempting to climb Mount Ararat, [Shacochis] vividly places you in both the past and present of his destinations . . . [his] restlessness and recklessness, all couched in a headlong maximalist prose, are impossible to resist.”—Boston Globe

“Shacochis’ fiery, wrought prose is on full display . . . This is travel writing at its finest.” —Men’s Journal, a Best Book of the Month

Best known for his sweeping international and political fiction narratives, including The Woman Who Lost Her Soul, which won the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and was finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, Bob Shacochis began his writing career as a pioneering journalist and contributing editor for Outside Magazine and Harper’s. Kingdoms in the Air brings together the very best of Shacochis’s culture and travel essays in one livewire collection that spans his global adventures and his life passions; from surfing, to his obsession with the South American dorado, to the time he went bushwhacking in Mozambique. Replete with Shacochis’s signature swagger, humor, and crystalline wisdom,Kingdoms in the Air is a majestic and essential collection from one of our most important writers.

Bob Shacochis’s first collection of stories, Easy in the Islands, won the National Book Award for First Fiction, and his second collection, The Next New World, was awarded the Prix de Rome from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is also the author of the novel Swimming in the Volcano, a finalist for the National Book Award, The Immaculate Invasion, a work of literary reportage that was a finalist for The New Yorker Book Award for Best Nonfiction of the Year; and The Woman Who Lost Her Soul, which won the Dayton Peace Prize and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Shacochis is a contributing editor at Outside, a former columnist for Gentleman’s Quarterly, and has served as a contributing editor for Harper’s and GQ. His op-eds on the US military, Haiti, and Florida politics have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal.