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' 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.
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.
