New Book Roundups:

Grand Tour of Europe
Novelist Shirley Hazzard presents her literary impressions of another Italian city in The Ancient Shore: Dispatches from Naples, which includes an essay by biographer Francis Steegmuller. In Everything But the Squeal: Eating the Whole Hog in Northern Spain, British novelist John Barlow tastes chorizo, pork stew, and more unfamiliar dishes during his one-year quest through Galicia, Spain, to eat every single part of the regionally revered pig. New Yorker Mark Greenside goes to Brittany, France, for the summer with his girlfriend, mutually breaks up with her before the summer is halfway over, and ends up unexpectedly buying a house in I'll Never Be French (no matter what I do). Authors such as Franz Kafka and Elfriede Jelinek write with an insider's knowledge about the city in the latest anthology in the Traveler's Literary Companion series, Vienna.

In the Clouds
The photo book African Air, from National Geographic photographer George Steinmetz, is a compilation of ten years of work in Africa. Most of the photos were taken from his motorized paraglider while flying all over the African continent, from Cape Town to the Atlas Mountains in Morocco. Another photo book with a lofty view, Above All: Mount Whitney and California's Highest Peaks—with photographs by David Stark Wilson, text by Steve Roper, and a foreword by Kenneth Brower—captures images of California's "Fourteeners," mountains over 14,000 feet.