Matador Publishes Its First Book, No Foreign Lands

In editing this book, I didn’t want a simple collection of travel “adages.” The idea was to create something diverse, literary, an arrangement of quotes creating an almost narrative-like experience for the reader. I wanted people to be able to return to No Foreign Lands again and again, particularly after reading the photographers’ notes, and find new frames of reference for their own experiences.

Some quotes are philosophical and have a feel of great distance from the journeys they describe, a kind of “summing up” of travel. Others are immediate, uttered spontaneously, and refer to specific places and moments. And still others are taken from novels, poems, songs, and speeches which develop new layers of meaning and inspiration in the context of travel.

Quote authors:

Reinhold Messner, Jim Harrison, Rumi, Willa Cather, Doug Peacock, Duke Kahanamoku, George Mallory, Jorge Luis Borges, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Jack Kerouac, John Muir, Albert Einstein, and dozens more.

Photography by:

Lola Akinmade Åkerström
Hal Amen
Ross Borden
Daniel C. Britt
Ben Ditto
Cody Forest Doucette
Paul Ferraris
Ryan Libre
Daniel Nahabedian
Aya Padrón
Richard Stupart
Paul Sullivan

The title

No Foreign Lands’ title is borrowed from a passage in one of Robert Louis Stevenson’s memoirs: “There is no foreign land; it is the traveller only that is foreign.” While much travel writing historically and today focuses on the “exotic” nature of other people, places, and cultures, No Foreign Lands explores how people are simply people, place is simply place, everywhere you go. For a traveler to regard people and places as “foreign” is to objectify them. These quotes remind us to see the world, as travel writer Mark Jenkins says, “the way it is, not the way you imagine it.”

There is a second layer to the title, however. Over the last decade, the internet has given us the ability to travel almost anywhere, to connect with other travelers as well as locals, and to transform our journeys into media with the power to reach millions.

This has made way for an unprecedented “travel culture” worldwide. We have entered an age where not only being “world travelers,” but feeling very much at home in the cultures and native languages of multiple countries, has become the everyday reality of thousands of people. Collectively, we form a nation of permanent travelers.

This is no better exemplified than by the photographers whose work features in this book, several of whom are raising multilingual, multicultural families, working, living, and traveling far from where they were born. Among many of us is a growing sense that there really are no “foreign lands” out there, but simply more places, people, and cultures to get to know.

No Foreign Lands is available for purchase directly through our e-store. We hope you enjoy it.