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*Featured in the Chicago Tribune's Great 2021 Fall Book Preview * One of Smithsonian Magazine's Ten Best Books About Travel of 2021*
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.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
November 16, 2021 -
Formats
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OverDrive Listen audiobook
- ISBN: 9780593505052
- File size: 372858 KB
- Duration: 12:56:47
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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Starred review from September 13, 2021
Taking his cue from Jules Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days and Xavier de Maistre’s Voyage Around My Room, historian Damrosch (How to Read World Literature) embarks on an enlightening tour of global literature. Stuck inside during the Covid-19 pandemic, Damrosch decided to travel via his bookshelves, the results of which are organized here by location: in the section on London, for example, he contends that Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway is a “subtly subversive book... never confined to its immediate time and place.” In Paris, meanwhile, Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood provides a “darkly ironic portrayal of the Left Bank’s louche denizens”; in Florence, Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron might be the world’s “first performance of a talking cure”; and in Palestine, poet Mahmoud Darwish captures the struggles of displaced Palestinians in his collection The Butterfly’s Burden. Damrosch’s richly conceived survey offers readers a colorful map for an illuminating, enlivening tour of their own libraries. Travel fans and literature lovers alike will find something to savor. Agent: Ric Simonoff, WME.
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