Overview

The World Is a Book, Indeed chronicles in eleven rich personal essays the ongoing quest of award-winning writer Peter LaSalle to embark on offbeat, often startlingly revelatory literary travel. A summer spent roaming the lesser-known quarters of Paris finds LaSalle haunted by the work of the French surrealists. In Hanoi, he meets for beers with the editors - two military men - of the Army Literature and Arts Magazine while investigating Vietnam's acknowledged great modern novel, Bao Ninh's The Sorrow of War. A strange nighttime drive with a dear friend through the streets of sprawling Sao Paulo, searching for landmarks associated with modernist Brazilian poetry, takes on grave weight when he learns of his friend's death shortly afterward. The outright adventure of bouncing around Africa to interview writers there when very young - looked back on now - moves toward a theory of the perhaps dreamlike tenor of any travel, especially when done alone. An account of Jorge Luis Borges's stay in Texas explores how the place made such a lasting impression on the Argentinian writer. Additional pieces bring LaSalle to Istanbul, Lisbon, Tunis, and elsewhere, as he considers major writers amid the settings that produced their works, all the while contemplating larger ideas engendered by travel, from issues of international politics to metaphysical understandings of time. Deeply felt and replete with insight into literature and life, this is a collection for readers who love books and want to learn more about the places they originated, presented by a well-traveled guide with an intimate voice and a gift for the essay form.

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9780807173961

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Reviews

LaSalle shows himself to be a smart and open writer with a restless intellect and infectious passion for travel and literature.--Publishers Weekly LaSalle's command of the language is admirable, but even more admirable is his moral vision.--Dallas Times-Herald LaSalle's dreamlike sense of exploration through past and present, memory and loss, the mundane and the profound, not only keeps the reader on the brink of discovery but also paints a picture far more vivid than any standard travel narrative.--Ploughshares LaSalle's stories are full of detail, and he knows how to create a sense of place, be it Buenos Aires, Austin, Texas, Paris, or Boston.--Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Author Information

Peter LaSalle is the author of two novels, five story collections, and a previous collection of essays on literary travel, The City at Three P.M. His writing on travel and literature has appeared in publications such as the Nation, the Progressive, Africa Today, the New England Review, the Southern Review, and Best American Travel Writing 2014 (selected by Paul Theroux). When not traveling, he divides his time between Austin, where he is a member of the creative writing faculty at the University of Texas, and Narragansett in his native Rhode Island.

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