The World Is a Book, Indeed chronicles in eleven rich personal essays the ongoing quest of award-winning writer Peter La Salle to embark on offbeat, often startlingly revelatory literary travel.
La Salle 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 La Salle 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.
About the author
Peter La Salle 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.
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