Since publishing the original edition of A Woman's World in 1995, Travelers' Tales has been the recognized national leader in women's travel literature, and with the launch of the annual series The Best Travel Writing in 2004, the obvious next step was an annual collection of the best women's travel writing of the year. This title is the eleventh in that series—The Best Women's Travel Writing—presenting stimulating, inspiring, and uplifting adventures from women who have traveled to the ends of the earth to discover new places, peoples, and facets of themselves.

The common threads connecting these stories are a female perspective and fresh, compelling storytelling to make the reader laugh, weep, wish she were there, or be glad she wasn't. The points of view and perspectives are global, and themes are as eclectic as in all of our books, including stories that encompass spiritual growth, hilarity and misadventure, high adventure, romance, solo journeys, stories of service to humanity, family travel, and encounters with exotic cuisine.

The 31 true travel stories in this year's collection are, as always, wildly diverse in theme and location. They tell of places like California and Cuba, Switzerland and Singapore, Iran and Iceland, Montana and Mexico and Mongolia and Mali, our own back yards and some of the farthest, most extreme corners of the world. They are the personal stories we can't help but collect when we travel, stories of reaching out to embrace the unfamiliar and creating cross-cultural connections while learning more about ourselves.

In The Best Women's Travel Writing, Volume 11, you will:

• go scuba diving with sharks in Palau


• cook for Syrian refugees in Greece


• be the first American to play pro basketball in the Czech Republic


• anger a nun in Ethiopia


• go whitewater rafting on the Nile in Uganda


• help slaughter a pig in Hungary


• realize your limits of filial piety in Singapore


• seek healing at the hands of a witchdoctor in Mexico


• feast on rancid food in Iceland


• avoid hypothermia by spooning in Mongolia


• fall in love in Nepal

... and much, much more.

Lavinia Spalding has edited four previous volumes of The Best Women's Travel Writing. She is also the author of Writing Away: A Creative Guide to Awakening the Journal-Writing Traveler and With a Measure of Grace, the Story and Recipes of a Small Town Restaurant, and she introduced the reissued e-book edition of Edith Wharton's classic travelogue, A Motor-Flight Through France. Her writing appears in numerous print and online publications, including Sunset, Yoga Journal, San Francisco magazine, The San Francisco Chronicle, Tin House, and The Best Travel Writing. She is co-founder of Weekday Wanderlust, a monthly travel reading series in San Francisco.