As a young man in the early days of his globe-trotting, Joe Sanderson, the hero of Héctor Tobar’s “The Last Great Road Bum” (MCD, 396 pages, $28), seeks out the novelist James Jones at a beach resort in Jamaica and gleans the following advice about becoming a writer: “Go out and associate yourself with the hardest, most foulmouthed people you can find, Joe. Failing that, seek out the people who are having the most sex.”Whether or not Sanderson had these guidelines in mind, his decades of border crossings brought him in...

Source: Wall Street Journal August 21, 2020 14:48 UTC