Around the World in 80 Books

A transporting and illuminating voyage around the globe, told through eighty classic and modern books.

Inspired by Jules Verne's hero Phileas Fogg, David Damrosch, set out to counter a pandemic's restrictions on travel by exploring the world via eighty exceptional books. Taking in London, Venice, Tehran and beyond, 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. .

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, as well as the struggle against patriarchal controls, seen in the work of Murasaki Shikibu a millennium ago and still in the novels 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.