It was like being Peter Pan, flying around, our book begins. In Freewheeling: The Collected Stories the author gives a clear nod and tip of the hat also to the picaresque works of Kerouac, Pirsig, Bellow, Cervantes, and Rabelais. Here are the adventures of two young vagabonds, Emery and Pike.

Pike had made a plan, the story goes. He was going to ride a bike south through Spain to Morocco, then east across North Africa to Italy. Emery proposes, I’ll join you if you do it backwards - from northern Italy south to Sicily and on to Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, and Spain. Going to Crete had come as an afterthought. They’d actually believed they would never see each other again.