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About Around The World In 80 Books
Product Description 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 *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. Review “It’s a kind of GPS raisonné that lets readers chart a meaningful path through milestones of literature on multiple continents.“ —Liesl Schillinger, The New York Times“There’s pleasure aplenty in Around the World in 80 Books . . . Mr. Damrosch offers succinct assessments of treasured titles in his library and tempts us to make them our own. Like a tour guide pointing travelers beyond the bus window, he nudges readers to notice parts of the global literary landscape they might have missed . . . Mr. Damrosch pays tribute to Stuart Little, the children’s book by E.B. White. The story of Stuart, a clever mouse who insists on living at human scale, is a fable of sorts about what literature can do. Through their gifts of imagination, the books Mr. Damrosch celebrates allow us, like White’s hero, to be just as large as we need to be.” —Danny Heitman, The Wall Street Journal“Damrosch’s curriculum is encyclopedic but at the same time fondly personal . . . Damrosch sees travel as a mental and moral challenge . . . Around the World in 80 Books takes us on a tour of the author’s global head, and while expanding our knowledge it enlarges our capacity for fellow-feeling.” —Peter Conrad, The Guardian“If there is an academic in America most committed to the idea of literature as a vast, human project, an artistic process of knowing and revealing that spans across social and political boundaries—even historical epochs—it is Harvard University’s David Damrosch . . . Around the World in 80 Books lifts us up and into locales as diverse as London and Cairo, Venice and Bar Harbor . . . [a] treasure chest of his own creation.” —Ryan Asmussen, Chicago Review of Books“Damrosch’s idiosyncratic intellectual itinerary is a gift that will inspire many a book group and inform many readers’ future travels.” —Passport “Damrosch draws together a diverse array of talented authors from all walks of life. They are both widely and lesser known, but all have one key thing in common: Their wr
