The World Is a Book, Indeed - by Peter Lasalle (Paperback)

About the Book

"The World Is a Book, Indeed" takes readers to Paris, Hanoi, Central Africa, Säao Paulo, and Istanbul, among other places, with engaging personal accounts that build on the convergence of writing, reading, and traveling. Peter LaSalle's expansive essays consider great writers amid the settings that produced their works, while allowing space for larger ideas engendered by literary travel, from comments on international politics to metaphysical understandings of time. During a summer in Paris, LaSalle's sadness about a friend's suffering amid the U.S. health care system interacts with reading French surrealists such as Louis Aragon and Andre Breton. A trip to Vietnam allows him to meet in Hanoi with the literary editors-all military men-of The People's Army Literature Magazine while investigating the country's great modern novel, Bao Ninh's The Sorrow of War. A lecture trip to Säao Paulo, Brazil, facilitates an examination of their celebrated modernist poets, with the excursion set against LaSalle's learning of the death of a Brazilian literary friend shortly afterward. Traveling to Istanbul to talk with the publisher and translator of one of his story collections triggers a haunting mind journey into his own past, exploring the idea of "invisible travel" and the works of Orhan Pamuk. Memories of time spent in Cameroon when young to interview African writers produces a theory of the very dreamlike tenor of any travel, especially when embarked on alone. 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 willingness to experiment with the essay form"--

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

LaSalle 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.... Readers who discover this literary gem will be delighted.--Publishers Weekly

LaSalle shows himself to be a smart and open writer with a restless intellect and infectious passion for travel and literature.--Publishers Weekly

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

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

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.