Around the World in 80 Books

Product Description

A transporting and illuminating voyage around the globe, through classic and modern literary works that are in conversation with one another and with the world around them
*Featured in the 
Chicago Tribune’s Great 2021 Fall Book Preview*

Inspired by Jules Verne’s hero Phileas Fogg, David Damrosch, chair of Harvard University’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 Prize–winners Orhan Pamuk, Wole Soyinka, Mo Yan, and Olga Tokarczuk, he explores how these works have shaped our idea of the world, and the ways in which 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 enduring problems, from the social consequences of epidemics to the rising inequality that Thomas More designed
Utopia to combat, as well as 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 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.

Review

“Damrosch’s curriculum is encyclopedic but at the same time fondly personal . . . Damrosch sees travel as a mental and moral challenge . . .
Around the World in 80 Books takes us on a tour of the author’s global head, and while expanding our knowledge it enlarges our capacity for fellow-feeling.” —
Peter Conrad, The Guardian

“A delightful global guide to literature, as [Damrosch] has expansively interpreted it . . . A year of isolation very well spent.” —
Harvard Magazine

“A vast, fascinating latticework . . . This rewarding literary Baedeker will inspire readers to discover new places.” —
Kirkus
 
“Damrosch’s richly conceived survey offers readers a colorful map for an illuminating, enlivening tour of their own libraries. Travel fans and literature lovers alike will find something to savor.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred)

“Restlessly curious, insightful, and quirky, David Damrosch is the perfect guide to a round-the-world adventure in reading. With such a companion, you never know where you will go next, but you can be confident that the encounter will be memorable. Count me in!”
—Stephen Greenblatt, author of Tyrant

“It is always a pleasure to talk about books with David Damrosch, who has read all of them, and he is so eloquent about them all.” —
Orhan Pamuk, Nobel Prize-winning novelist
 
“An insightful journey into the books that have long captivated us. Profound, boundless, and diverse.” —
Jokha Alharthi, author of the Man Booker International Prize-winning Celestial Bodies

“Pleasurable and full of insights,
Around the World in 80 Books is such a joyful journey through the places, times and people who have made our world literature. Every time I finished a chapter I felt an urge to discover or re-read the books whose stories Damrosch is telling so vividly—but that meant putting down his own book and I wasn’t able do that.” —
Dror Mishani, author of The Missing File and Three

Praise for David Damrosch:

“David Damrosch’s
The Buried Book is a remarkably original, narrative analysis of the loss, rediscovery