At Speed: Traveling the Long Road between Two Points

A collection of nonfiction travel essays that document and bring to life six road trips undertaken by the author.

North Dakota Quarterly

“[Olsen] has the rare ability to catch cultural highlights and report them verbally by merely traveling through the vast expanses of the Midwest. Bu the narrative does not remain confined to it. . . . What makes this narrative alluring is that the author manages to shed a different light on many places he visits and takes away the cliché of tediousness with which these places are often associated. . . . This travel book is a good read, and I emphatically recommend it to people interested in places off the beaten track.”

W. Scott Olsen is a professor of English at Concordia College in Moorhead, Minnesota. In addition to being editor in chief of Ascent, a literary magazine of fiction, essays, and poetry, he is the author of several books, including Gravity, The Allure of Distance: Essays on the Act of Travel, as well as the editor of several anthologies, including A Year in Place.