World Is a Book, Indeed

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 São 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. There's even an exploration of Jorge Luis Borges's stay in Texas, a place that made such a lasting impression on the Argentine author. 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.