Gianni Celati’s new book Adventures in Africa (University of Chicago Press), is a wonderful anti-travel book by one of the great anti-literary writers of the day. His wanderings through Mali, Senegal and Mauritania are recounted in diary form perhaps almost as he wrote them. Celati will never be a travel writer of the Granta variety, heading forth into adventures: he is instead self-consciously a tourist and he knows that there is no escape from that definition. A book, as the jacket blurb puts it, of “the utter discombobulation of travel.” Celati is the author of Voices of the Plains (Serpents Tail), the finest book of stories to appear in a long time.