Around the World in 80 Books

Location & Checkout Length	Call Number	Checkout Length	Item Status
Malletts Adult Books 4-week checkout	Adult Book / Nonfiction / Literary Arts / General / Damrosch, David	4-week checkout	In transit
Traverwood Adult Books 4-week checkout	Adult Book / Nonfiction / Literary Arts / General / Damrosch, David	4-week checkout	On Hold Shelf
Downtown 2nd Floor 4-week checkout	809 Da	4-week checkout	Due 10-27-2024
Pittsfield Adult Books 4-week checkout	Adult Book / Nonfiction / Literary Arts / General / Damrosch, David	4-week checkout	Due 10-18-2024
Westgate Adult Books 4-week checkout	Adult Book / Nonfiction / Literary Arts / General / Damrosch, David	4-week checkout	Due 10-01-2024

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.
"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.

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COMMUNITY REVIEWS

enjoyable, especially for avid readers submitted by hbcarter on June 24, 2024, 9:22am The concept of this book is a great one for readers. The choice of books includes capital C Classics and books I'd not heard of before, but all of them are placed in the context of their location. Even when he was discussing a book I'd read set in a place I've been, I learned something interesting.

I'd say it's more of a memoir of travel and reading than a scholarly work, especially given that there aren't consistent themes in what he focuses on in one place versus another. But I think any structure beyond the baseline would have been too limiting, and I really enjoyed following whatever inspired him about a location and the books set there.