The World Between Two Covers: Reading the Globe

by Ann Morgan

Overview

A beguiling exploration of the joys of reading across boundaries, inspired by the author’s year-long journey through a book from every country.

Ann Morgan writes in the opening of this delightful book, "I glanced up at my bookshelves, the proud record of more than twenty years of reading, and found a host of English and North American greats starting down at me…I had barely touched a work by a foreign language author in years…The awful truth dawned. I was a literary xenophobe."

Prompted to read a book translated into English from each of the world's 195 UN-recognized countries (plus Taiwan and one extra), Ann sought out classics, folktales, current favorites and commercial triumphs, novels, short stories, memoirs, and countless mixtures of all these things. The world between two covers, the world to which Ann introduces us with affection and no small measure of wit, is a world rich in the kind of narratives that engage us passionately: we meet an irreverent junk food–obsessed heroine in Kuwait, an explorer from Togo who spent years among the Inuit in Greenland, and a former child circus performer of Roma background seeking sanctuary in Switzerland. Ann's quest explores issues that affect us all: personal, political, national, and global. What is cultural heritage? How do we define national identity? Is it possible to overcome censorship and propaganda? And, above all, why and how should we read from other cultures, languages, and traditions? Illuminating and inspiring, The World Between Two Covers welcomes us into the global community of stories.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781631490682
Publisher:	Liveright Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	04/27/2015
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	336
File size:	617 KB

About the Author

Ann Morgan is a freelance writer and editor. She continues to blog about books at ayearofreadingtheworld.com and lives with her husband, Steve Lennon, in South London

Editorial Reviews

…[The World Between Two Covers] offers a persuasive rebuttal to the indifference some may feel regarding the limited availability of foreign-language works, given that there are already more books than anyone has time to read. The power wielded by the Anglo-American publishing industry over what gets translated produces uniformity; to encounter a true diversity of perspectives, Morgan demonstrates, may require some research and even some legwork.

The New York Times Book Review - Timothy Aubry

02/16/2015
As journalist Morgan relates in this introspective debut, she took it upon herself to learn more about international literature after looking at her shelves and realizing that her reading had been almost exclusively British and North American. Her project (which she turned into a blog, A Year of Reading the World) was to devote a year to reading books from each of the world’s 196 countries. Morgan explored cultural differences in storytelling styles while reading the mythology-steeped Telesa YA series by Samoan author Lani Wendt Young. She also learned about propaganda and censorship from Uzbek novelist Hamid Ismailov’s The Railway, and she reflected on how the West views totalitarian regimes after reading My Life and Faith, the memoir of North Korean war hero Ri In Mo. The book’s themes include the difficulties of getting published in other languages, the imperfection of translation, and the inequities of a global cultural tradition still dominated by Western imperialism. While Morgan briefly touches on the individual books she read (a full list appears in the back), her purpose is to examine publishing and access to books on a global scale, not to summarize her reading experience. For that, readers can go to her blog. The reward for readers of this volume is a greater appreciation of global literature and the inspiration to reexamine one’s own reading habits. Agent: Caroline Hardman, Hardman & Swainson. (May)

Publishers Weekly

"Morgan knows how important it is to see things from other perspectives, to dispel the myths of superiority that our cultures have instilled in us. Her project and her book are important, vital even, in an ever-expanding global community."

Literary Hub - Jonathan Russell Clark

"Only a writer like Morgan could make reading about reading so sublimely fascinating: over a year, she immerses herself in a book from every country on the globe, and shares the profound fruits of her pursuit."

Entertainment Weekly

"This book has a very neat conceit…Morgan covers the 'landscape' of global literature, the state of publishing…the politics of translation and how the west is represented in non-occidental literatures. It is a vast field but the breezy style, infectious enthusiasm and nicely pitched tone mean it is both diverting and illuminating."

Guardian - Stuart Kelly

"The World Between Two Covers is an exquisitely written book that manages to be both a compelling quest narrative and a moving exploration into the joys of reading. Ann Morgan is a wonderful writer—astute and accessible, lyrical and lush—and this is a book so compelling it's impossible to put down."

Molly Antopol

"[The World Between Two Covers] offers a persuasive rebuttal to the indifference some may feel regarding the limited availability of foreign-language works, given that there are already more books than anyone has time to read. The power wielded by the Anglo-American publishing industry over what gets translated produces uniformity; to encounter a true diversity of perspectives, Morgan demonstrates, may require some research and even some legwork."

Timothy Aubry

"Extraordinary…. [The World Between Two Covers] reads less like a collection of book reviews and more of a cultural excavation of the global literary landscape. It challenges the reader instead of merely suggesting reading material, and turns our own literary prejudices inside out. Why do we choose the books we read? What does that say about us? Should we even bother reading books in translation? The answer is an unequivocal yes…. At its heart, The World Between Two Covers is a love letter to literature and a battle cry to read world literature."

The Rumpus - Elizabeth Silver

04/01/2015
When journalist Morgan realized she was a "literary xenophobe," she decided to spend 2012 reading (and blogging about) a book-length narrative from each country in the world as, she said, "part-penance, part-prophylactic." Her blog, ayearofreadingtheworld.com, contains detailed entries on her experiences with each book she chose. This title explores the venture as a concept and as a whole project, addressing the many sticky issues Morgan dealt with along the way: How many countries exist? Says who? What exactly is world literature? What about authenticity? Politics? Censorship? Translations? How does one get books from [insert country here]? How does one read and blog about almost 200 books in one year and still have a job? Should one research a culture, or contextualize a narrative before reading a work? (Morgan says no, in what initially feels like an anti-intellectual attack; her tone gradually tempers.) This would have been a fascinating project to follow as it proceeded. VERDICT Fans of the author's blog may appreciate this in-depth concluding exploration. Readers who are new to the project may be less hooked into the work and might benefit from looking at the blog first. [See Prepub Alert, 11/24/14.]—Audrey Snowden, Orrington P.L., ME

Library Journal

2015-01-15
Exploring the world, one book at a time.American bookstores stock only a tiny selection of translated works, making it nearly impossible for readers to gain access to world literature. In her lively, debut book, journalist and blogger Morgan, regretting that she has been "a literary xenophobe," recounts her project to spend a year reading one book, translated or written in English, from every country in the world. That project proved more difficult than she imagined: In many countries, publishers release thousands of translated copies of Anglophone authors, rather than support indigenous writers. The literary world, therefore, has been dominated by books from a few nations, and readers "can never entirely remove the blinkers and filters put on our reading goggles." Censorship has impeded publication, too, as Morgan discovered when she tried to find literature from North Korea. A cultural delegate responded that "he was not aware of any adult fiction produced in the entire seven-decade history of the republic" but only politically oriented works that "demonstrated loyalty, honour, and self-sacrifice for the motherland." The ubiquity of English has had an impact on academic writing as well as commercial books. Scholars worry "that other languages are denuded of the specialist terms needed to express complex ideas and discoveries" by the pressure to write in English. Some fiction writers, striving for publication, try to imitate Western-style novels rather than draw upon their own cultures. Reading indigenous works that evoke a new time and place, though—like a hugely popular young-adult series written by a Samoan housewife—confronted Morgan with ideas and views that felt startlingly fresh. An appendix lists 196 books that the author read on her journey, including selections from Bhutan, Cape Verde, Ivory Coast, Iraq and Sierra Leone; most were published by small, independent presses. Morgan's intrepid literary project underscores the crucial importance of stretching the boundaries of one's aesthetic and intellectual worlds.

Kirkus Review