If you’re seeking to experience the breadth of Jan Morris’ compassionate witnessing of the 20th century, this anthology of her travel journalism spans half a century, and includes her historic piece on the first ascent of Mt. Everest in 1953, all the way to her return to Hong Kong during the handover of 1997. Morris has a Forrest Gumpian knack for showing up at the right place at the right time, but the collection transcends mere reportage by tracking the evolution of her thinking about post-colonialism, global identity, and the wretched of the earth.

One of literature’s greatest magic tricks and Morris’ only work of fiction, Hav is a portrait of a country invented by Morris and visited by her not just once but twice in two novellas which are now collected together in this handsome NYRB edition. This is the sort of book one keeps a secret and shares only with best friends.

Morris wrote a number of excellent books focused on places (Hong Kong, Venice, Oxford, Manhattan, and her home of Wales), but her best is this love letter to the lesser known city just up the street from Venice. Trieste signifies a certain nothingness to many, but to Morris means everything.

Morris writes proudly of spending half her life as a man, then half as a woman. Her memoir is frequently described as an artifact, a groundbreaking historical work that set the foundation for trans literature and activism to come, but is better enjoyed in the same manner that one reads Morris’ travel writing: as a adventure story, pure and simple, into the depths of her own humanity.

A pure shot of Morris’ voice, this volume of her diaries arrived just a year before her passing, and will be followed by another called Thinking Again (January 2021). There is a cozy joy in reading her thoughts on the politics of our day, strewn with her ever sharp and unsentimental observations of old age, her own minor celebrity, and the Welsh weather, as she finally ceased her global wandering.

Just as Morris was a modern innovator of hybrid forms, Alexievich has propelled the field of journalism forward through her collaging of unattributed dialogue taken from her intimate interviews with citizens of the former U.S.S.R. The brilliance of her technique was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, and shines best in this work that explores everyday passions and fears in the wake of communism’s fall.

Sebald and Morris have a shared interest in how landscape embodies history, and Sebald creates novels exposing how a mind moving through a landscape can experience that history in way that can rupture and ultimately shatter the self. Not exactly a novel, not exactly a memoir, not exactly a work of history—on its surface, The Rings of Saturn is simply a walk along the English coast, but as its title implies, has universal implications for humanity.

If one had to pick Morris’ direct literary progeny, Dyer would surely be among them, as a lyrical British travel writer with great self interest and greater self deprecation. The bulk of this essay collection finds Dyer in the American Southwest exploring his fascination with works of Land Art, ecologically-minded monuments that incorporate a sense of deep time. But much like Morris, Dyer knows that there is equal pleasure to be find in the quotidian—for example, his obsession with American doughnuts, which occupies an entire, extraordinary essay.

First unfairly labeled as a Sebaldian copycat from the publication of his novel Open City, Cole has emerged as an innovator of photography as a literary form (follow his ever-shifting, elliptical instagram @_tejucole for a taste). This gorgeous book pairs Cole’s photographs of cities and nature with snippets of evocative personal narrative. How is the image you see related to the experiences of a globalized citizen such as Cole, such as ourselves? Like much of Morris’ journalism, this book can be leafed through for piecemeal enjoyment, or binged for a masterful understanding of Cole’s new vision for experiencing the world by being explicit about our historical biases and aesthetic passions.

There is no travel writer who has not mastered the art of speaking with strangers, and Cusk has pushed that art farther and more directly into literature. One might see Morris’ Hav as the truest expression of her travel writing, despite it concerning a fictional place, and likewise this trilogy of novels (Outline, Transit, Kudos) by Cusk embodies a 21st century de-centering of the global traveler by tracing episodes with a nameless and largely backgroundless narrator who we come to know only through her deep attention to the words of strangers. We don’t know if Jan Morris ever read these books, but one imagines that she either loved or hated them, as one often does with things too close to one’s own heart and purpose.