The World Is a Book, Indeed: Writing, Reading, and Traveling (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780807173961)

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.

LaSalle spends a summer roaming the lesser-known quarters of Paris, haunted by the writing 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. Other pieces find LaSalle on a strange nighttime drive through the streets of sprawling S縊 Paulo in search of landmarks associated with Brazilian modernist poetry, bouncing around Africa to interview writers there when very young, exploring Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges's memorable stay in Texas, and traveling to Istanbul, Lisbon, Tunis, and elsewhere, as he considers major writers amid the settings that produced their works.

Deeply felt and replete with insight into literature and life itself, even capable of evoking valid mind leaps in its innovative approaches, 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.

Author: Peter Lasalle
ISBN-10: 0807173967
ISBN-13: 9780807173961
Publisher: LSU Press
Language: English
Published: 10/07/2020
Pages: 240
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.68lbs
Size: 8.50h x 5.50w x 0.55d

Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 08/31/2020