Book

Around the world in 80 books / David Damrosch.

Summary:

"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." -- Provided by publisher.

Record details

ISBN: 9780593299883
ISBN: 0593299884
Physical Description: xix, 412 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm
Publisher: New York : Penguin Books, 2021.
Copyright: ©2021

Content descriptions

Bibliography, etc. Note:

Includes index and bibliographical references (pages 401-412).

Formatted Contents Note:

London : Inventing a City -- Paris : Writers' Paradise -- Krakow : After Auschwitz -- Venice-Florence : Invisible cities -- Cairo-Istanbul-Muscat : Stories within stories -- The Congo-Nigeria : (Post)Colonial encounters -- Israel/Palestine : Strangers in a strange land -- Tehran-Shiraz : A desertful of roses -- Calcutta/Kolkata : Rewriting empire -- Shanghai-Beijing : Journeys to the west -- Tokyo-Kyoto : The west of the east -- Brazil-Columbia : Utopias, dystopias, heterotopias -- Mexico-Guatemala : The Pope's blowgun -- The Antilles and beyond : Fragments of epic memory -- Bar Harbor : the world on a desert island -- New York : Migrant metropolis.

Chapter one. London: Inventing a City : Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway ; Charles Dickens, Great Expectations ; Arthur Conan Doyle, The Complete Sherlock Holmes ; P. G. Wodehouse, Something Fresh ; Arnold Bennett, Riceyman Steps -- Chapter two. Paris: Writers' Paradise : Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time ; Djuna Barnes, Nightwood ; Marguerite Duras, The Lover ; Julio Cortazar ; Georges Perec, W, or the Memory of Childhood -- Chapter three. Krakow: After Auschwitz : Primo Levi, The Periodic Table ; Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis and Other Stories ; Paul Celan, Poems ; Czeslaw Milosz, Selected and Last Poems, 1931-2004 ; Olga Tokarczuk, Flights -- Chapter four. Venice-Florence: Invisible cities : Marco Polo, The Travels ; Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy ; Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron ; Donna Leon, By Its Cover ; Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities -- Chapter five. Cairo-Istanbul-Muscat: Stories within stories : Love Songs of Ancient Egypt ; The Thousand and One Nights ; Naguib Mahfouz, Arabian Nights and Days ; Orhan Pamuk, My Name is Red ; Jokha Alharthi, Celestial Bodies -- Chapter six. The Congo-Nigeria: (Post)Colonial encounters : Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness ; Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart ; Wole Soyinka, Death and the King's Horseman ; Georges Ngal, Giambatista Viko, or The Rape of African Discourse ; Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, The Thing Around Your Neck -- Chapter seven. Israel/Palestine: Strangers in a strange land : The Hebrew Bible ; The New Testament ; D. A. Mishani, The Missing File ; Emile Habibi, The Secret Life of Saeed the Pessoptimist ; Mahmoud Darwish, The Butterfly's Burden -- Chapter eight. Tehran-Shiraz: A desertful of roses : Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis ; Farid ud-Din Attar, The Conference of the Birds ; Faces of Love: Hafez and the Poets of Shiraz ; Ghalib, A Desertful of Roses ; Agha Shahid Ali, Call Me Ishmael Tonight -- Chapter nine. Calcutta/Kolkata: Rewriting empire : Rudyard Kipling, Kim ; Rabindranath Tagore, The Home and the World ; Salman Rushdie, East, West ; Jamyang Norbu, The Mandala of Sherlock Holmes ; Jhumpa Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies -- Chapter ten. Shanghai-Beijing: Journeys to the west : Wu Cheng'en, Journey to the West ; Lu Xun, The Real Story of Ah-Q and Other Stories ; Eileen Chang, Love in a Fallen City ; Mo Yan, Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out ; Bei Dao, The Rose of Time -- Chapter eleven. Tokyo-Kyoto: The west of the east : Higuchi Ichiyo, In the Shade of Spring Leaves ; Murasaki Shikibu, The Tale of Genji ; Matsuo Basho, The Narrow Road to the Deep North ; Yukio Mishima, The Sea of Fertility ; James Merrill, "Prose of Departure" -- Chapter twelve. Brazil-Columbia: Utopias, dystopias, heterotopias : Thomas More, Utopia ; Voltaire, Candide, or Optimism ; Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas ; Clarice Lispector, Family Ties ; Gabriel Garcià Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude -- Chapter thirteen. Mexico-Guatemala: The Pope's blowgun : Cantares Mexicanos: Songs of the Aztecs ; Popl Vuh: The Mayan Book of the Dawn of Life ; Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, Selected Works ; Miguel Angel Asturias, The President ; Rosario Castellanos, The Book of Lamentations -- Chapter fourteen. The Antilles and beyond: Fragments of epic memory : Derek Walcott, Omeros ; James Joyce, Ulysses ; Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea ; Margaret Atwood, The Penelopiad ; Judith Schalansky, Atlas of Remote Islands -- Chapter fifteen. Bar Harbor: the world on a desert island : Robert McCloskey, One Morning in Maine ; Sarah Orne Jewett, The Country of the Pointed Firs ; Marguerite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian ; Hugh Lofting, The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle ; E. B. White, Stuart Little -- Chapter sixteen. New York: Migrant metropolis : Madeleine L'Engle, A Wrinkle in Time ; Saul Steinberg, The Labyrinth ; James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son ; Saul Bellow, Henderson the Rain King ; J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings.