The World Is a Book, Indeed: Writing, Reading, and Traveling

by Peter LaSalle

Overview

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.

LaSalle spends a summer roaming the lesser-known quarters of Paris, haunted by the writing 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. Other pieces find LaSalle on a strange nighttime drive through the streets of sprawling São Paulo in search of landmarks associated with Brazilian modernist poetry, bouncing around Africa to interview writers there when very young, exploring Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges's memorable stay in Texas, and traveling to Istanbul, Lisbon, Tunis, and elsewhere, as he considers major writers amid the settings that produced their works.

Deeply felt and replete with insight into literature and life itself, even capable of evoking valid mind leaps in its innovative approaches, 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780807173961
Publisher:	Louisiana State University Press
Publication date:	10/07/2020
Pages:	240
Sales rank:	1,139,884
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Peter LaSalle is the author of two novels, five story collections, and a previous collection of essays on literary travel, The City at Three P.M. His writing on travel and literature has appeared in, among others, The Progressive, Africa Today, New England Review, Southern Review, and The Best American Travel Writing 2014 (selected by Paul Theroux). He teaches creative writing at the University of Texas at Austin.

Editorial Reviews

★ 08/31/2020

LaSalle (Sleeping Mask) delivers a wonderful collection of essays about his extensive travels, to places both literary and actual, over his career as a fiction writer and writing instructor. Though LaSalle’s prose is consistently elegant and thoughtful (“Aren’t we all travelers in our dreams, wandering alone and solitary, constantly being drawn to a place where we should be... a voice often urging us on?” ), one particularly strong piece is his essay on writer Bao Ninh, known for writing an autobiographical 1991 novel, The Sorrow of War, about serving in the North Vietnamese People’s Army. Other highlights include a wonderfully detailed selection about São Paulo that ends up a bittersweet elegy for a former colleague, and recollections of taking a deep dive during the late 1970s into the Cameroonian literature and arts scene. To supplement this last piece, LaSalle provides an assortment of his reviews of books set in Africa, among them J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians, which “cuts to the bone in its universality” to societies beyond the author’s own South Africa, and V.S. Naipaul’s A Bend in the River, which is “artistically deft” but overly pessimistic in its look at the continent’s “many problems and looming woes.” Readers who discover this literary gem will be delighted. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

LaSalle's dreamlike sense of exploration through past and present, memory and loss, the mundane and the profound, not only keeps the reader on the brink of discovery but also paints a picture far more vivid than any standard travel narrative.

Ploughshares

LaSalle's stories are full of detail, and he knows how to create a sense of place, be it Buenos Aires, Austin, Texas, Paris, or Boston.

Atlanta Journal-Constitution

LaSalle's command of the language is admirable, but even more admirable is his moral vision.

Dallas Times-Herald