'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.
