The World Is a Book, Indeed: Writing, Reading, and Traveling

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 ...