![]() "Listen, they got plenty of roads in Australia." In the simple act of writing a travel book about your peregrinating down back roads you sort of lay claim to every back road on earth, or so people think. Why not try the blue highways of Russia or Brazil? "Or what about the back roads of Italy, Bill?" you can almost hear them saying. ![]() Yet that had also struck me as peculiar, because there must have been any number of publishers cooing into telephones, urging the man to repeat the formula. ![]() And I think most people, reflecting on the silence since "Blue Highways" appeared in 1982, believed - and who could blame them? - that William Least Heat-Moon's excellent book would not have a successor. Isn't there a man in New Haven, sounding as desperate as a woman in a paternity suit, who is always threatening to publish his book? But it's a common condition. As you know, many writers produce a first book, worthy in every respect, and while there is often a muttered mention or a breathless hush regarding a second book, the thing never appears: phantom pregnancy. $24.95.Ī nation's literary history is always rich in phantom pregnancies. ![]()
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