I’ve long been looking forward to the release of Lonely Planet’s latest literary anthology, Tales from Nowhere: Unexpected Stories from Unexpected Places — not just because it contains one of my new stories, but because I found the theme so compelling. As editor Don George says in the introduction, “Nowhere is a setting, a situation and a state of mind. It’s not on any map, but you know it when you’re there.”

In my story, entitled “The Living Museum of Nowhere and Everywhere,” I cover new personal-literary ground — not Namibia or Paraguay or Borneo, but the small town of Minneapolis, Kansas, where I stumble into a museum that makes me reconsider what is and is not a worthy travel attraction — and how these travel attractions express the soul of a community.

Some of the other stories in the travel anthology involve Simon Winchester bringing home an unsought souvenir from Equatorial Guinea, Pico Iyer finding nothingness in greater abundance than he’d hoped for on Easter Island, Christopher Cox confronting lethal mines and memories en route to Pol Pot’s Cambodian hideout, Pam Houston bounding into bliss among the kangaroos and characters of rural Australia, Stanley Stewart traveling upriver past the last human settlement in Sarawak, and Joshua Clark exploring hurricane-ravaged Louisiana.

Tales From Nowhere can be found in most bookstores, or purchased online here .