E-Mail This Article to a Friend World traveler Susan Orlean’s many beats BY AMY FINCH

Susan Orlean has a massive imagination. Most people would look at a supermarket or a telephone line or a shower curtain and their minds would come to a screeching halt. But Orlean knows that stories lurk everywhere, in day-to-day drear as well as on mountaintops on the other side of the planet. The New Yorker staff writer (and former Phoenix columnist) is an omnivorous littérateur drawn to the damnedest things: a taxidermy competition, fertility treatments in the barely reachable country of Bhutan, life in an Oregon trailer park, a Paris record store that sells only African music. In the introduction to her new collection, My Kind of Place: Travel Stories from a Woman Who’s Been Everywhere, Orlean calls her pieces "profiles, essays, reporter-at-large, whatever." These new whatevers carry on the tradition she began with her earlier collections, Saturday Night (Knopf, 1990) and A Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup (Random House, 2001). That is, she continues her all-over-the-map gallivanting with irrepressible curiosity, a dry wit, and a lack of cynicism.

People unfamiliar with Orlean’s writing might know her as the Meryl Streep character in the movie Adaptation, which was inspired by Orlean’s The Orchid Thief (Random House, 1998). In the book, she tromped through the muck of Florida (past, present, figurative, literal) to reveal a subculture centered on the title flower. The synthetic yet wild airlessness of the Sunshine State seemed as prominent a character as the orchid-obsessed John Laroche, with his nutty logic and toothless bravado.

In My Kind of Place, too, locales and people pop out in equally high relief. Sometimes Orlean set out to write about a specific place — a street in Bangkok teeming with world travelers, or a radioactive lake in Hungary; sometimes she began these pieces "with narratives, and the places emerged as characters only after my reporting began." When she first heard about a tiger-hoarding woman in New Jersey, she was most intrigued by the big-cat-lady aspect. But soon the oddness of the where was running neck-and-neck with the what, and she found herself considering the ways in which a town and its inhabitants can change as the years pass.

When Orlean writes about a place, its state of flux within the larger context of history is often her focus. A restaurant in Havana taken over during the Cuban revolution continues to haunt a group of immigrants. Midland, Texas, besides unleashing a certain dolt on the world, is a dead scorch of dirt that has boomed and busted with the price of oil, leaving behind a stark mix of affluent snobs and failed businesses. For a few weeks, she hangs out at an independently owned supermarket in Queens, capturing the employees’ easygoing camaraderie and the generally amiable atmosphere as people work, shop, and buy. The store is an anomaly in this age of megastores, and Orlean nicely captures its small-town feel, which in the end will be lost when it gets sucked up by some huge conglomerate with no connection to the neighborhood.

Sometimes a simple ho-hum service or product will lead her into deeper philosophical waters. Who buys the stuff in SkyMall, the airplane-seat-pocket catalogue that peddles things like vibrating tongue cleaners and the Keep Your Distance Insect Vacuum? Whose idea was that popular shower curtain printed with the world map? Why are papaya stores such a hit in NYC?

As in The Orchid Thief, Orlean throws herself body and soul into her work. There are no alligator-infested swamps this time around, but she does trudge up Fujiyama, the highest mountain in Japan and a geographical and spiritual icon. (The Japanese, nevertheless, seem to contemplate climbing it more than they actually make the upward plod.) She imagines her excursion will be "a trip to the un-Japan, a country I wasn’t even sure existed anymore except in nostalgic dreams." When she finally gets to the summit, after a sleepless night on a wooden shelf, the fog is so thick that she can’t see anything at all: "the whole of Japan was spread out underneath us but you’d never know it." Nevertheless, she’s content. "This seemed like the Japanese way of seeing the mountain, less with my eyes than with my mind’s eye. I was a material climber, but I had been won over to the conceptual side." She might be clowning, but still, that conceptual side is where you’ll often find Susan Orlean.

Susan Orlean reads this Tuesday, October 19, at 6 p.m. at the Brattle Theatre, 40 Brattle Street in Harvard Square. It’s free, but tickets are required from the Harvard Book Store; call (617) 661-1515.