from the "literary journeys" dept.

There's been a lot of discussion this week amongst the travel writer crowd about a new book by a former guidebook author.

Thomas Kohnstamm's book Do Travel Writers Go To Hell? is being hailed (by the publisher) as blowing the lid off the crazy world of travel writing. The book is the (supposed) true story of Kohnstamm's experience as a travel writer -- which we all know is incredibly exciting. Chortle.

The book hasn't yet hit the shelves (April 22) but it is already creating quite a stir.

And then someone leaked comments about the book from the private Lonely Planet authors group (which I am part of) hosted at Yahoo!.

They ended up in the New York Observer:

Over the weekend, news spread among the vast global network of Lonely Planet travel guide writers that one of their own had gone native.

His name is Thomas Kohnstamm. He worked for Lonely Planet for three straight years, contributing to guidebooks on South America and the Caribbean. Now, at 32, he has written a book of his own, to be published on April 22 by an imprint of Random House. It’s about his experiences as a delinquent travel guide writer who cut every corner because he was so short on time and money.

The main idea, Mr. Kohnstamm explained yesterday, is that “even on a good day, a fair amount of what ends up in a guidebook is arbitrary, and therefore people shouldn’t necessarily treat them as gospel.” The book is called Do Travel Writers Go to Hell? It’s Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, but with tourism.

News of Hell’s imminent release came to the Lonely Planet community directly from the company’s Australia-based CEO Judy Slatyer, who wrote a dramatic letter to the private Lonely Planet Yahoo! group. [ MORE ]

I, like every other travel writer on the planet, am certainly looking forward to Thomas's book. It'll make good reading as I head off to Ukraine, via Safeco Field, in exactly two weeks!

Cheers!