Who doesn’t dream of escape, whether to defy a conventional or routine life, outrun danger, pursue an extraordinary goal, or, most inevitably, to distance oneself from suffering, loss, and pain, from the "one great escape we’ll never be able to pull off," as Gideon Bosker and Lena Lenèek write in their introduction. Now Escape offers the perfect experience for all who wants to lose themselves in worlds that are "anywhere but here"—that show us the pleasures, solaces, and revelations of getaways of every kind. Included in this collection are stories, novel excerpts, and narrative non-fiction pieces from twenty-two writers, including: ·Isaac Babel, who in "Awakening" writes of the dual pull between the security and warmth of the family and the alarming, yet mysterious allure of the world beyond. ·Winston S. Churchill, in a stunningly suspenseful narrative, on his escape from prison during the Boer War. ·Barbara Greene, cousin of Graham Greene, on their epic trek through Liberia. ·Nella Larsen, the Harlem Renaissance writer, on the precarious proposition of escape from racial stereotyping and class prejudice into the treacherous terrain of "passing." ·D.H Lawrence, in "The Man Who Loved Islands," offering an ironic twist on the thrill of island getaways, who answers the question: What if that expanse of sea and space that insulates against the cares and unpleasantness of life ends up threatening to suffocate us? ·Tim O’Brien, in "The Things They Carried," which presents an unsentimental, startlingly compelling inventory of the totems and relics of coherence that soldiers carry into the field of battle as gateways to alternate realities. ·Sylvia Townsend Warner, who takes us on a hilarious "outing" that is as evanescent as a bubble. ·Joseph Wechsberg, on being derailed from his practical studies into the demimonde of Parisian soubrettes, gigolos, hawkers, and street performers—in short, into the bohemian worlds that to this day define the magical word "Paris." "Our entire lives can be written as chronicles of escapes," write Bosker and Lenèek in their introduction, "from parental supervision to the chaos and abandon of drugs, sex, and rock ‘n’ roll; from bourgeois self-control into the intoxicating swirl of the Seven Deadly Sins; from the city to the country, and back again. . . . Escape, at heart, is the prerequisite for entering alternative states of mind and heart, for occupying alien physical or emotional places that permit reflections that might not otherwise be possible." Escape offers a vital record of this essential human impulse.