Around the World in 80 Books
Ratings2
Average rating4.5
15
Ratings2
Average rating4.5
'Restlessly curious, insightful, and quirky, David Damrosch is the perfect guide to a round-the-world adventure in reading' Stephen Greenblatt A transporting and illuminating voyage around the globe, told through eighty classic and modern books 'It is always a pleasure to talk about books with David Damrosch, who has read all of them, and he is so eloquent and understanding about them all' Orhan Pamuk Inspired by Jules Verne's hero Phileas Fogg, David Damrosch, chair of Harvard'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 prizewinners Orhan Pamuk, Wole Soyinka, Mo Yan and Olga Tokarczuk, he explores how these works have shaped our idea of the world, and the ways 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 perennial problems, from the social consequences of epidemics to the rising inequality that Thomas More designed Utopia to combat and 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 that of 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.
Reviews with the most likes.
Are you interested in finding out the best books from around the world? Would you like to be guided in your quest by a longtime professor? I can't think of a better guide than David Damrosch and I can't think of a better book than Around the World in 80 Books.
Just for my own information, I'm including a list of the books here:
Chapter one. London : Inventing a City
Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
Charles Dickens, Great Expectations
Arthur Conan Doyle, The Complete Sherlock Holmes
P. G. Wodehouse, Something Fresh
Arnold Bennet, Riceyman Steps
Chapter two. Paris : Writers' Paradise
Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time
Djuna Barnes, Nightwood
Marguerite Duras, The Lover
Julio Cortazar, The End of the Game
Georges Perec, W, or the Memory of Childhood
Chapter three. Krakow : After Auschwitz
Primo Levi, The Periodic Table
Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis and Other Stories
Paul Celan, Poems
Czeslaw Milos, Selected and Last Poems, 1931-2004
Olga Tokarczuk, Flights
Chapter four. Venice-Florence : Invisible cities
Marco Polo, The Travels
Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy
Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron
Donna Leon, By Its Cover
Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
Chapter five. Cairo-Istanbul-Muscat : Stories within stories
Love Songs of Ancient Egypt
The Thousand and One Nights
Naguib Mahfouz, Arabian Nights and Days
Orhan Pamuk, My Name Is Red
Jokha Alharthi, Celestial Bodies
Chapter six. The Congo-Nigeria : (Post)Colonial encounters
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
Chinua Achelbe, Things Fall Apart
Wole Soyinka, Death and the King's Horseman
Georges Ngal, Giambarista Viko, or The Rape of African Discourse
Chimamanda Negozi Adichie, The Thing Around Your Neck
Chapter seven. Israel/Palestine : Strangers in a strange land
The Hebrew Bible
The New Testament
D. A. Mishani, The Missing File
Emile Habibi, The Secret Life of Saeed the Pessoptimist
Mahmoud Darwish, The Butterfly's Burden
Chapter eight. Tehran-Shiraz : A desertful of roses
Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis
Farid ud-Din Attar, The Confessions of the Birds
Faces of Love: Haze and the Poets of Shiraz
Ghalib, A Deceitful of Roses
Agha Shahid Ali, Call Me Ishmael Tonight
Chapter nine. Calcutta/Kolkata : Rewriting empire
Rudyard Kipling, Kim
Rabindranath Tagore, The Home and the World
Salman Rushdie, East, West
Jamyan Norbu, The Mandela of Sherlock Holmes
Jhampa Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies
Chapter ten. Shanghai-Beijing : Journeys to the west
Wu Cheng'en, Journey to the West
Lu Xun, The Real Story of Ah-Q and Other Stories
Eileen Chang, Love in a Fallen City
Mo Yan, Life and Earth Are Wearing Me Out
Bei Dao, The Rose of Time
Chapter eleven. Tokyo-Kyoto : The west of the east
Higuchi Ichiyo, In the Shade of Spring Leaves — 231
Muraski Shikibu, The Tale of Genji — 235
Matsuo Basho, The Narrow Road to the Deep North — 240
Yukio Mishima, The Sea of Fertility — 245
James Merrill, “Prose of Departure” — 250
Chapter tweleve. Brazil-Columbia : Utopias, dystopias, heterotopias
Thomas More, Utopia
Voltaire, Candide, or Optimism
Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, Posthumours Memoirs of Brds Cubas
Clarice Lispector, Family Ties
Gabriel García Márquez One Hundred Years of Solitude
Chapter thirteen. Mexico-Guatemala : The Pope's blowgun
Cantares Mexicanos: Songs of the Aztecs
Popol Vuh: The Mayan Book of the Dawn of Life
Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, Selected Works
Miguel Ángel Asturias, The President
Rosario Casstellanos, The Book of Lamentations
Chapter fourteen. The Antilles and beyond : Fragments of epic memory
Derek Walcott, Omeros — 309
James Joyce, Ulysses — 315
Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea — 319
Margaret Atwood, The Penelopida — 324
Judith Schalansky, Atlas of Remote Islands — 329
Chapter fifteen. Bar Harbor : the world on a desert island
Robert McCloskey, One Morning in Maine
Sarah Orne Jewett, The Country of the Pointed Firs
Marguerite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian
Hugh Lofting, The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle
E. B. White, Stuart Little
Chapter sixteen. New York : Migrant metropolis
Madeleine L'Engle, A Wrinkle in Time
Saul Steinberg, The Labyrinth
James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son
Saul Bellow, Henderson the Rain King
J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings
Epilogue: the Eighty-first Book
