In The City at Three PM, award-winning fiction writer Peter LaSalle offers 11 startlingly original personal essays dealing with his longtime quest for world travel of the literary sort. The range of offbeat experiences is wide—from driving recklessly across the county when young to seek out Saul Bellow in Chicago, to settling in for long evenings at a pub in Dublin with Christy Brown, the celebrated Irish author afflicted with cerebral palsy who typed with his toes and was the subject of the movie My Left Foot . In Buenos Aires LaSalle senses metaphysical transport while investigating Borges' work; in Cameroon he attends the wonderful opening of a small bookstore; in Hollywood he finds himself caught in a crazy mob scene while researching the work of 1930s master novelist and screenwriter Nathanael West; in Tunisia he follows in the footsteps of Flaubert at the ruins of ancient Carthage. And those are just some of the adventures. Having first appeared in distinguished publications here and abroad, including The Best American Travel Writing, these are beautifully crafted pieces—heartfelt, honest, observant—that conjure up those fine moments when travel does intersect with the important role of literature in our lives.
Author
LaSalle graduated from Harvard University with a B.A. in 1969, and the University of Chicago with an M.A. in 1972. His fiction has appeared in magazines and journals such as AGNI, Antioch Review, Paris Review, Tin House, New England Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Yale Review, Zoetrope: All-Story, and others. His essays, articles, and book reviews have appeared in The Nation, The Progressive, Worldview, Commonweal, The New York Times Book Review, The Chicago Sun-Times, The Los Angeles Times, and others. His work has been included in over 20 anthologies. He has been teaching at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is a resident faculty member at the Michener Center for Writers, since 1980, and has held the title of Susan Taylor McDaniel Regents Professor in Creative Writing in the Department of English since 2001. Before that, he taught at Johnson State College in Vermont (1974-76), Iowa State University (1977-80), and was a visiting faculty member with Harvard University Summer School from 1985-1997. His awards include the Flannery O'Connor Award for Tell Borges If You See Him, the Richard Sullivan Prize in Short Fiction for What I Found Out About Her, the The Antioch Review Award for Distinguished Prose, an O. Henry Award (1991), and a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship.
