Book details

Travels with Lizbeth

Three Years on the Road and on the Streets

Author: Lars Eighner

Travels with Lizbeth

Travels with Lizbeth

$11.99

About This Book

A New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice, Travels with Lizbeth: Three Years on the Road and on the Streets is Lars Eighner’s account of his descent into...

Page Count
304
On Sale
12/03/2013

Book Details

A New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice, Travels with Lizbeth: Three Years on the Road and on the Streets is Lars Eighner’s account of his descent into homelessness and his adventures on the streets that has moved, charmed, and amused generations of readers.

Selected by the New York Times as one of the 50 Best Memoirs of the Past 50 Years

“When I began writing this account I was living under a shower curtain in a stand of bamboo in a public park. I did not undertake to write about homelessness, but wrote what I knew, as an artist paints a still life, not because he is especially fond of fruit, but because the subject is readily at hand.”

Containing the widely anthologized essay “On Dumpster Diving,” Travels with Lizbeth is a beautifully written account of one man’s experience of homelessness, a story of physical survival, and the triumph of the artistic spirit in the face of enormous adversity. In his unique voice—dry, disciplined, poignant, comic—Eighner celebrates the companionship of his dog, Lizbeth, and recounts their ongoing struggle to survive on the streets of Austin, Texas, and hitchhiking along the highways to Southern California and back.

“Lars Eighner is the Thoreau of the Dumpsters. Comparisons to Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Hamsun’s Hunger leap to mind. A classic of down-and-out literature.”—Phillip Lopate, author of Bachelorhood: Tales of the Metropolis

“Eighner’s memoir contains the finest first-person writing we have about the experience of being homeless in America. Yet it’s not a dirge or a Bukowski-like scratching of the groin but an offbeat and plaintive hymn to life. It’s the sort of book that releases the emergency brake on your soul…A literate and exceedingly humane document.”—The New York Times

Imprint Publisher

St. Martin's Press

ISBN

9781466836440

In The News

“The most eloquent description to date of what it is like to be homeless.” —San Diego Union-Tribune

“Compelling…Mr. Eighner [is] a quirky guide into the homeless condition as he plunges on, through Miracle Miles, desert flea markets and dusty truck stops.” —The Wall Street Journal

“Lars Eighner’s memoir contains the finest first-person writing we have about the experience of being homeless in America. Yet it’s not a dirge or a Bukowski-like scratching of the groin but an offbeat and plaintive hymn to life.” —Dwight Garner, The New York Times Book Review

About the Creators

Travels with Lizbeth

Travels with Lizbeth

$11.99