A stunning tour of 50 of the world’s most extraordinary destinations selected from the World Monuments Fund’s most important sites of global heritage. In commemoration of its 50th anniversary, the World Monuments Fund has commissioned some of today’s most important writers to give voice to the organization’s work around the world over the past 50 years. Curated by the International Center of Photography, the book features striking images from renowned photographers, including Edward Burtynsky, Tiina Itkonen, Erich Lessing, Gideon Mendel, and Sebastião Salgado. In essence, this is a bucket list for the educated traveler—armchair or otherwise. From Venice and Petra to New Orleans and Angkor, Easter Island to the Tempel Synagogue in Kraków, Poland, to the Mughal Gardens of Agra, India, to the Chancellerie d’Orléans in Paris, World Monuments presents 50 of the world’s most compelling destinations, cultural heritage sites, and significant architectural works that must be seen and preserved.
Author
André Aciman was born in Alexandria, Egypt and is an American memoirist, essayist, novelist, and scholar of seventeenth-century literature. He has also written many essays and reviews on Marcel Proust. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, The Paris Review, The New Republic, Condé Nast Traveler as well as in many volumes of The Best American Essays. Aciman received his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Harvard University, has taught at Princeton and Bard and is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature at The CUNY Graduate Center. He is currently chair of the Ph. D. Program in Comparative Literature and founder and director of The Writers' Institute at the Graduate Center. Aciman is the author of the Whiting Award-winning memoir Out of Egypt (1995), an account of his childhood as a Jew growing up in post-colonial Egypt. Aciman has published two other books: False Papers: Essays in Exile and Memory (2001), and a novel Call Me By Your Name (2007), which was chosen as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and won the Lambda Literary Award for Men's Fiction (2008). His forthcoming novel Eight White Nights (FSG) will be published on February 14, 2010
