This collection of essays meditates on the nature of literary opportunity and the impulse to escape conventional life. Using examples of seafaring voyages, frontier rushes, polar and mountain exploits, and writers who left settled surroundings, the author argues that modernity has narrowed traditional frontiers while urging readers and writers to seek chances in overlooked places. Other pieces examine the craft of finding copy, the duty to dig for truth, the bond between person and book, and rural landscapes, memory, and vanished livelihoods as sources of literary material.