Magical Souvenirs: Mystical Travel Stories from Around the World
The highly recommendedMagical Souvenirsis for readers who relish the inexplicable moments of travel: the bizarre coincidences, true miracles, and still-unsolved mysteries. This collection of stories, edited by Arielle Ford, features dispatches from the edge of the world and even the edge of consciousness. (Ford includes a section called "Dreams and Visions" where people speak of travels inside their minds.) In the section called "Unexplainable," Jeremiah Sullivan writes of a harrowing, but ultimately friendly, close encounter with a great white shark while filming forMutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdomoff the coast of Australia. In "Sacred Sites, Synchronicity and Shamanism" Jesse Heller-Frank writes of visiting as a teenager a local "storyteller" in Israel who mystically healed her troubled relationship with her father. Kathleen McGowan writes about "The Wrong Pub at the Right Time," in which she and her friend stumble into a Dublin pub after an exhausting day of travel only to meet the men they will each marry. In a section about "Prophecy and Omen," editor Arielle Ford writes of the fortune-telling birds on the streets of Hong Kong that sang out the accurate prediction that she would marry within four years. One of the greatest appeals is that the contributors are not long-winded, big-name writers. They are everyday folks who may as well be sitting at your dinner table, telling fascinating tales in four pages or less.--Gail Hudson