"The World Is a Book, Indeed" takes readers to Paris, Hanoi, Central Africa, São Paulo, and Istanbul, among other places, with engaging personal accounts that build on the convergence of writing, reading, and traveling. Peter LaSalle's expansive essays consider great writers amid the settings that produced their works, while allowing space for larger ideas engendered by literary travel, from comments on international politics to metaphysical understandings of time. During a summer in Paris, LaSalle's sadness about a friend's suffering amid the U.S. health care system interacts with reading French surrealists such as Louis Aragon and Andre Breton. A trip to Vietnam allows him to meet in Hanoi with the literary editors-all military men-of The People's ArmyLiterature Magazine while investigating the country's great modern novel, Bao Ninh's The Sorrow of War. A lecture trip to São Paulo, Brazil, facilitates an examination of their celebrated modernist poets, with the excursion set against LaSalle's learning of the death of a Brazilian literary friend shortly afterward. Traveling to Istanbul to talk with the publisher and translator of one of his story collections triggers a haunting mind journey into his own past, exploring the idea of "invisible travel" and the works of Orhan Pamuk. Memories of time spent in Cameroon when young to interview African writers produces a theory of the very dreamlike tenor of any travel, especially when embarked on alone. This is a collection for readers who love books and want to learn more about the places they originated, presented by a well-traveled guide with an intimate voice and a willingness to experiment with the essay form"--