Artist in Person "I didn't much care for the Baracusan desert except for the mirages."-Gustave Flaubert There is one place that has no Michelin Guide, no Baedekers-the fantastical land of the imagination. The flights may be wild and the accommodations few and far between, but the sublimity of travel there has never been satisfactorily reported. Steve Fagin's The Amazing Voyage of Gustave Flaubert and Raymond Roussel is a seductive travelogue about the lush, oedipally imploded, literarily expansive psychic landscape of the eponymous authors. This fragmented tour through boundless vistas follows Flaubert, staid and deliberate, and Roussel, jaded and delirious, on their overlapping journeys to a place called the Imaginary. Using dubious historical facts, audacious literary allusions, and many a psychoanalytic pronouncement, Fagin advances psycho-travel as a charting of the creative impulse. What the tourist finds is the tourist. Unusual, associative objects-falsified maps, exotic postcards, manipulated artworks-provide an itinerary that is always open to interpretation. The intimated topography of unearthly obsessions and collapsing cultures in The Amazing Voyage... leads one to believe that thinking is the best way to travel.-Steve Seid