About Us
Natural Traveler Books
Natural Traveler Books® is an indie publisher of novels, short stories and poetry, memoirs and essays. A division of Natural Traveler® LLC, we also publish the cultural quarterly, Natural Traveler Magazine®.
Consider us the port of embarkation for those driven to humankind’s insatiable need to explore, but more an exploration of those interior journeys that inspire us to record, through the arts, what we have seen, heard and felt.
“One’s destination is never a place, Henry Miller said,
"but a new way of looking at things,”
For a writer, traveling is a continuous loop, an endless exercise in research and discovery. We see man/woman as a traveler by basic instinct, in fact a natural traveler. And the best of what we produce artistically is the result. As stated in our logo, beneath our symbol of the great white heron, we celebrate those bound to wade through the marshes of life’s journeys and never give up. We welcome you to travel along with us.
Tony Tedeschi's Acclaimed Thriller, Unfinished Business, Debuts as the First Novel by Natural Traveler Books
“A complex thriller set in the cutthroat world of corporate maneuvering… Raymond Chandleresque… characterizations help to make Tedeschi’s thriller into an efficient, spirited romp… An enjoyably diverting mystery story.”
--Kirkus Reviews
“A provocative, insightful thriller. From a massacre in a Honduran Indian village to major corporate boardrooms where greed reigns, Unfinished Business grips you from the first page and doesn’t let go until the stunning conclusion. A provocative, insightful thriller.”
--Donald Bain, author of Murder, She Wrote book series
Devastating Computer Hack of a Global Corporation . . . Interruption of the International Supply Chain . . . Illegal Manipulation of Short Sales . . . Money Laundering Through a Caribbean Bank . . . Rebellious Board Members Vs Corrupt CEO . . . Woman vs The Glass Ceiling
Can headlines from the business pages make for a gripping detective story?
For Unfinished Business, Tony Tedeschi has turned his first-hand experience as a business writer, along with his extensive travels as a contributor to magazines and newspapers from The New York Times to the Los Angeles Times, into a who-done-it built around a business plot. Instead of a detective in the traditional sense, the protagonist is a corporate investigator, whose knowledge of the supply chain and business connections around the world are employed to find the source of computer interference and a series of catastrophic mishaps, which are bringing down a multinational corporation.
Unfinished Business on Amazon
Unfinished Business is available in Softcover and Kindle versions
on Amazon via the link below or at the top of this page.
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Nine Women, Nine Stories
I’ve been doing this sort of thing since I wrote my first stories,
in my first notebook, in my early teenage years . . .
Not only was it a matter of process for my work, but the process even became a plot device in stories I’ve written about my alter ego, Michael (aka Mike, aka Mikey) Rhodes.
“You make other people’s lives your own,” says Gabby, the female object of Michael’s writing in the story, That Last Year at Oloffson’s. “Then you lie about what you see. You’re using people.”
“Don’t be naïve, Gabby,” Michael retorts. “Everyone uses other people.”
“Oh that’s so egotistical,” she snaps. “You’re judging people.”
“I’m creating characters,” he says. For some reason, he likes that answer. He felt he was regaining some measure of control.
“Why are you doing this?” Michael’s travel editor asks in the story, Key Largo, where he is fictionalizing what he views as a mini drama evolving at a table opposite them. She is awaiting her lift to the airport after a tourism conference in Costa Rica, leaving him to write one of his stories for her magazine.
“It makes for a far more interesting narrative,” he says.
Despite her emphasizing she expects a straight travel article, when he submits his assignment, Michael’s obsession becomes even more pronounced when he resorts to unrestrained fabulism during his stay in the country.
My life was more a journey over decades of traveling far and wide, he explains, in Just Josephine, the story that closes this collection. He goes on, I’m searching for subjects to fill out my need to turn everything I experience into subject matter in my notebooks.
So, who among my female characters are real, partially real, mostly fictitious, complete figments of my imagination?
I was a student at MIT and belonged to a fraternity there. But did I ever meet anyone like Siobhan Leary in the opening story, Chemistry?
I did serve four years as an Air Force officer during the Vietnam War. But was anyone like Aldina, in the story,Tumbleweed, even a remote part of my experience there? Let alone a metaphor for the woman I’d marry?
I finished the New York City Marathon with a woman who was a policeman’s wife, and I did have a neighbor with a severely disabled son. But were they one and the same person or a projection into the single character who becomes Michael’s love interest in The Policeman’s Wife.
There was a Josephine, who was my friend in elementary school, and two other young girls in my neighborhood with whom I played as a very young boy, but . . .
It was a long time ago. Then again, I did find five pages about such an encounter in a long-forgotten notebook . . .
-- Tony Tedeschi
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In All Directions
Join award-winning travel writer Bill Scheller as he gets lost in Venice, bicycles the length of Canada’s Prince Edward island, hikes England’s Peak District, and follows Columbus’ route through the Bahamas. These are just a few of the adventures that await in this selection drawn from Scheller’s thirty years on assignment for some of America’s favorite travel magazines.
Bill Scheller’s prose is so artfully crafted he could write about any subject and you will want to read it. Fortunately, he is also astute at finding places you really do want to know about, with the dual benefit of offering up compelling subject matter, beautifully delivered. Whether he is driving around the boot of Italy in 18 days, searching for Columbus in the Bahamas, snowmobiling Quebec’s Gaspe Peninsula, or always finding time to work his unmatched expertise on train travel, you will want to go there with him. The music of his prose is such that you feel you are reading short stories by some of the masters of that genre. If you are seduced to make specific selections that strike your fancy from the titles in the book’s table of contents that will only draw you deeper into all of Scheller’s explorations. So, do yourself a favor; start at the beginning and read through this wonderful selection of stories from Scheller’s thirty years of writing for major travel media.
About the Author
Bill Scheller is an award-winning travel writer living in Vermont. A former contributing editor with Islands and National Geographic Traveler, he is the author of Train Trips: Exploring America By Rail, Spectacular Paris, America: A History in Art, Colonial New England on Five Shillings a Day, and more than 20 other titles, including a collaboration on Columbus and the Age of Discovery, companion to the public television series. His novella set in Venice, A Patent of Nobility, is available as a Kindle book.