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"A transporting and illuminating voyage around the globe, through classic and modern literary works that are in conversation with one another and with the world around them. Inspired by Jules Verne's hero Phileas Fogg, David Damrosch, chair of Harvard University's department of comparative literature and founder of Harvard's Institute for World Literature, set out to counter a pandemic's restrictions on travel by exploring eighty exceptional books from around the globe. Following a literary itinerary from London to Venice, Tehran and points beyond, and via authors from Woolf and Dante to Nobel Prize-winners Orhan Pamuk, Wole Soyinka, Mo Yan, and Olga Tokarczuk, he explores how these works have shaped our idea of the world, and the ways in which the world bleeds into literature. To chart the expansive landscape of world literature today, Damrosch explores how writers live in two very different worlds: the world of their personal experience and the world of books that have enabled great writers to give shape and meaning to their lives. In his literary cartography, Damrosch includes compelling contemporary works as well as perennial classics, hard-bitten crime fiction as well as haunting works of fantasy, and the formative tales that introduce us as children to the world we're entering. Taken together, these eighty titles offer us fresh perspective on enduring problems, from the social consequences of epidemics to the rising inequality that Thomas More designed Utopia to combat, as well as the patriarchal structures within and against which many of these books' heroines have to struggle -- from the work of Murasaki Shikibu a millennium ago to Margaret Atwood today. Around the World in 80 Books is a global invitation to look beyond ourselves and our surroundings, and to see our world and its literature in new ways." --… (more)
User reviews
This work is a series of essays regarding literature from various places around the globe. If you were looking for something more in the vein of Nancy Pearl's Book Lust
Recommended for readers who enjoy a more scholarly tone on writing, and those who may be in the literary field themselves.
I requested and received a free e-book copy from PENGUIN GROUP/The Penguin Press via NetGalley. Thank you!
London: way less egotistically boring Dalloway and more Doyle! "A Study in Scarlet" on Gutenberg...
Paris - Cruel Lost Time with memory of Proust and his rats.
Krakow - Never more
Inspired to read [Bleak House] and "Axolotl."
Books I wish I'd never read: Heart of Darkness and In Cold Blood and Silence of the Lambs...
Israel - recently finished Old Testament, midway through The New
Palestine - listened to Mahmoud Darwish on Youtube and am searching for print copy of "Tariq"
Tehran-Shiraz - Find more Agha Shahadal "Call Me Ishmael tonight"
Tagore - re-read FIREFLIES
Salman Rushdie - just finished Joseph Anton - will find Midnight Children
Tokyo - So the great Basho leaves the child to die and Mishima gives another horror story while Merrill leaves dying Paul
Brazil - sadness of Thomas More
(Future editions would be enriched with larger photos.)
Bar Harbor - Charlotte's Web is way superior to Stuart Little
NYC - in place of Bellow, give slightly out of state: Faulkner Intruder in the Dust,
To Kill a Mockingbird, and Melville, no?