"Travel and Ghosts" is a collection of masterful essays and essayistic prose pieces, starting with one of Stangl's earliest publications, a report on a journey to Northwest Mexico tracing the footsteps of Antonin Artaud, and extending to unpublished semi-fictional diary entries that also take place in Mexico. In this volume, Thomas Stangl offers insight into his workshop while also providing commentary on literature. It explores landscapes, films and images, songs and books, with a focus on exceptional states such as travel or illness, for which these semi-conscious states of mind—this drifting away and simultaneously opening of attention—are so defining, as we also find in the central passages of his novels. "For a long time, I have strived to exist only in writing," begins a text that describes existence.