I cried a bunch while reading Edge of the World (out May 6, 2025). A profoundly topical collection, Alden Jones’s latest anthology collects sixteen* autobiographical pieces about travel from writers loosely connected by their complicated American-ness and LGBTQ+ identities. I appreciated Jones’s intentions in titling the anthology—in hoping that “the contents undermine the idea of cultural centrality” as well as exploring “queer origins on the edge of society…with our outsider status” mapping onto our travels. The anthology succeeds on both counts. There is a thoughtful nuance in the stories, a willingness to consider broader contexts and interconnectedness that was heartwarming in light of recent events.
Each one of the stories is richly heartfelt and thoughtful in considering how broader contexts affect the narrator’s experience of moving across borders and boundaries. If you enjoyed the memoirs of Trevor Noah or Putsata Reang (one of the contributors) or Ocean Vuong’s autofiction, this book is a must-read. Moving through both time and space, the stories all together cover half a century and span the world. Narrators draw from personal, political, and inherited histories as they reflect on how travel has changed them, and the ways they have affected others in turn.
Travel is messy and complicated and can arouse mixed emotions, particularly when someone who inhabits a body that is racially othered in America finds themselves in an ethnic enclave (as in Daisy Hernandez’s story about visiting Cuban relatives in Hialeah, Florida) or the country their parents immigrated from (like Putsata Reang on her return to Cambodia). It an also reinforce otherness, the sense of being a perpetual foreigner or tourist in the land your parents or grandparents can trace their roots back to but where you can barely understand the language, let alone attempt to find a deeply concealed queer community (as Raluca Albu recounts of a trip to Russia).
Relationships are equally as tricky to navigate, and the above three stories are just as much about what we conceal and code-switch in conversations with partners, family members, loved ones of all kinds in order to more easily navigate the spaces we share—and the sacrifices we make to belong in those spaces, just enough to press a little closer to those that make us feel more ourselves. For example, the ways the glamorous, boisterous femininity Hernandez enjoys on the bus rides to Hialeah and sees as part of her cultural context contrasts with and is complicated by her nonbinary partner, particularly in the rigidly gendered context of her immigrant extended family’s (Cuban) Spanish—a rigidity which is beautifully dismantled by KB Brookins’ experience at a Pride celebration in Mexico in the book’s last story.
Then there is Sara Orozco’s aching confrontation with a budding preacher, after many community service hours spent tiptoeing around the subject of her sexuality. The last few passages in Orozco’s story are heart-wrenching in their raw feeling, their portrayal of the pain left behind when treasured bonds are broken in the pursuit of a more honest truth. This story shows the lengths we go to in search of acceptance, if not understanding.
After all, it is such care that makes life not only bearable, but possible.
The search for such meaningful connections is the through-line of the book, as it is in the lives of many queer people (and readers!). I remember how, on my first day in New York City, I only asked for directions from visibly LGBTQ+ folks. This was the tentative first steps of someone moving from a pretty intolerant place to a (rapidly gentrifying) one that had served as the backdrop for all her teenage hopes and dreams. It was also a desperate attempt to materially remind myself that I wasn’t really as alone as I had felt while silently sobbing over Auden and Adrienne Rich’s poetry in my childhood bedroom many, many miles away.
So I understandably teared up at a scene in Alex Marzano-Lesnevich’s story of starting a lesbian social circle in early 2000s New Orleans. On an unspecified night, on an unspecified street, a young lesbian runaway approaches Marzano-Lesnevich and their (they were presenting as a woman and using she/her pronouns at the time) girlfriend to ask for a hug. For affirmation, for connection. It was a ships-in-the-night scenario, a brief moment of contact that was no less meaningful to those involved for its transience. And if relationships are the accumulation of many brief moments of intimacy and care, Marzano-Lesnevich and Genevieve Hudson’s stories are hopeful monuments to communities created by such transient, meaningful actions.
The second line of Jones’ introduction to the anthology says that “We travel to find each other”. I believe most readers will be able to find pieces of themselves and their loved ones, their fears and anxieties and hopes and dreams reflected in these pages. While the stories will remind readers that the fraughtness and fear of moving through an unjust world is not new, they also express something more hopeful, more powerful: that the importance of community to surviving and thriving remains as old as love.
Whether you’ve traveled the world or only two towns over, there is probably a story or two that will speak to you. The rest will hopefully expand your perspective on what is possible—or better yet, where it is possible to go from here.
Who Will Enjoy This:
- Fans of Joan Didion who wish her writing was slightly more empathetic and compassionate.
- Fans of Hunter S. Thompson who wish the same.
- Readers looking for affirmations on the importance of community.
- Readers who like travel writing.
Who Might Think Twice:
- Readers who don’t like travel writing.
- Readers who found A Little Life tedious more for its depictions of setting than its depiction of trauma.
- (Actually, I would recommend both these folks still give the anthology a go because of the way the stories are centered around community and interacting with signifiers more than the act of signification itself.)
*about half of these center sapphic themes and narratives
Content warnings: substance use, homophobia
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