The world between two covers : reading the globe

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Title:

The world between two covers : reading the globe

Author:

Morgan, Ann (Ann Beatrice), author.

Uniform Title:

Reading the world

ISBN:

9781631490675

Edition:

First American edition.

Physical Description:

326 pages ; 25 cm

General Note:

First published in Great Britain in 2015 by Harvill Secker under the title Reading the world: confessions of a literary explorer.

Contents:

Deciding to travel : the impulse to read the world -- Plotting the route : the global literature landscape -- Identifying landmarks : cultural identity and the problem of authenticity -- Following the trade routes : publishing around the world -- Venturing off the beaten track : writers commercial publishing doesn't reach -- Taking alternative modes of transport : oral narratives -- Encountering roadblocks : censorship, propaganda and exiled writers -- Broadening the mind : empathy and politics in literature -- Dealing with culture shock : when books and readers clash -- Finding myself : representations of the West in books around the world -- Crossing the language barrier : translation -- Surveying the road ahead : technology and the internet.

Personal Subject:

Morgan, Ann (Ann Beatrice)-Books and reading.

Subject Term:

Books and reading.

Women journalists -- Books and reading -- England.

English literature -- Publishing -- Foreign countries.

Literature -- Translations into English -- Publishing.

Publishers and publishing.

National characteristics in literature.

Geography and literature.

Literature and the Internet.

Summary:

"A beguiling exploration of the joys of reading across boundaries, inspired by the author's year-long journey through a book from every country. Following an impulse to read more internationally, journalist Ann Morgan undertook first to define "the world" and then to find a story from each of 196 nations. Tireless in her quest and assisted by generous, far-flung strangers, Morgan discovered not only a treasury of world literature but also the keys to unlock it. Whether considering the difficulties faced by writers in developing nations, movingly illustrated by Burundian Marie-Thérese Toyi's Weep Not, Refugee; tracing the use of local myths in the fantastically successful Samoan YA series Telesa; delving into questions of censorship and propaganda while sourcing a title from North Korea; or simply getting hold of The Corsair, the first Qatari novel to be translated into English, Morgan illuminates with wit, warmth, and insight how stories are written the world over and how place-geographical, historical, virtual-shapes the books we read and write" --

Holds:

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Library	Call Number	Status
Searching... Oakdale Library	028.9 MOR	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Stillwater Public Library	028.9 MOR	Searching... Unknown

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Summary

Ann Morgan writes in the opening of this delightful book, "I glanced up at my bookshelves, the proud record of more than twenty years of reading, and found a host of English and North American greats starting down at me...I had barely touched a work by a foreign language author in years...The awful truth dawned. I was a literary xenophobe."

Prompted to read a book translated into English from each of the world's 195 UN-recognized countries (plus Taiwan and one extra), Ann sought out classics, folktales, current favorites and commercial triumphs, novels, short stories, memoirs, and countless mixtures of all these things. The world between two covers, the world to which Ann introduces us with affection and no small measure of wit, is a world rich in the kind of narratives that engage us passionately: we meet an irreverent junk food-obsessed heroine in Kuwait, an explorer from Togo who spent years among the Inuit in Greenland, and a former child circus performer of Roma background seeking sanctuary in Switzerland. Ann's quest explores issues that affect us all: personal, political, national, and global. What is cultural heritage? How do we define national identity? Is it possible to overcome censorship and propaganda? And, above all, why and how should we read from other cultures, languages, and traditions? Illuminating and inspiring, The World Between Two Covers welcomes us into the global community of stories.

Author Notes

Ann Morgan is a freelance writer and editor. She continues to blog about books at ayearofreadingtheworld.com and lives with her husband, Steve Lennon, in South London

Reviews (5)

Publisher's Weekly Review

As journalist Morgan relates in this introspective debut, she took it upon herself to learn more about international literature after looking at her shelves and realizing that her reading had been almost exclusively British and North American. Her project (which she turned into a blog, A Year of Reading the World) was to devote a year to reading books from each of the world's 196 countries. Morgan explored cultural differences in storytelling styles while reading the mythology-steeped Telesa YA series by Samoan author Lani Wendt Young. She also learned about propaganda and censorship from Uzbek novelist Hamid Ismailov's The Railway, and she reflected on how the West views totalitarian regimes after reading My Life and Faith, the memoir of North Korean war hero Ri In Mo. The book's themes include the difficulties of getting published in other languages, the imperfection of translation, and the inequities of a global cultural tradition still dominated by Western imperialism. While Morgan briefly touches on the individual books she read (a full list appears in the back), her purpose is to examine publishing and access to books on a global scale, not to summarize her reading experience. For that, readers can go to her blog. The reward for readers of this volume is a greater appreciation of global literature and the inspiration to reexamine one's own reading habits. Agent: Caroline Hardman, Hardman & Swainson. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Booklist Review

Well read though she was, Morgan accepted that she was a literary xenophobe, having read only British and American writers. She pledged to do something about it in a yearlong challenge to read the world 196 nations through books. Generous strangers and book lovers across the globe flooded her with recommendations. Confronted with so many choices, Morgan also had to ponder how translations, notions of cultural authenticity, shifting borders, and preconceived expectations of different cultures factor into reading books from other cultures. Among her discoveries: works by peripatetic authors with hard-to-pin-down nationalities, such as Oonya Kempadoo's Buxton Spice (1999), Mongolian Galsan Tschinag's The Blue Sky (2006), Burundian Marie-Therese Toyi's Weep Not, Refugee (2007), the Samoan YA series Telesa, and works by such challengers to cultural nationalism as Haitian Canadian Dany Laferrière's I Am a Japanese Writer (2008). Morgan considers how the same imperialist impulses that have put Europe at the center of mapmaking have applied to valuing literature, and she offers Goethe's appeal 200 years ago to read widely of other cultures. Sound advice and, given Morgan's guide, no excuses.--Bush, Vanessa Copyright 2015 Booklist

New York Review of Books Review

Ashamed to discover almost no foreign-language novels on her bookshelves, Morgan, a British writer, resolves to spend a year reading a novel from every country in the world. The most memorable moments in her thoughtful account center on the extraordinary lengths she goes to in order to obtain books from certain places and the equally extraordinary efforts of strangers to help her. Significantly, her difficulties reflect the well-nigh insurmountable obstacles that writers in countries disconnected from London or New York face in finding an audience for their work. Although "The World tween Two would have benefited from more in-depth discussions of particular novels, it offers a persuasive rebuttal to the indifference some may feel regarding the limited availability of foreign-language works, given that there are already more books than anyone has time to read. The power wielded by the Anglo-American publishing industry over what gets translated produces uniformity; to encounter a true diversity of perspectives, Morgan demonstrates, may require some research and even some legwork.

Kirkus Review

Exploring the world, one book at a time.American bookstores stock only a tiny selection of translated works, making it nearly impossible for readers to gain access to world literature. In her lively, debut book, journalist and blogger Morgan, regretting that she has been "a literary xenophobe," recounts her project to spend a year reading one book, translated or written in English, from every country in the world. That project proved more difficult than she imagined: In many countries, publishers release thousands of translated copies of Anglophone authors, rather than support indigenous writers. The literary world, therefore, has been dominated by books from a few nations, and readers "can never entirely remove the blinkers and filters put on our reading goggles." Censorship has impeded publication, too, as Morgan discovered when she tried to find literature from North Korea. A cultural delegate responded that "he was not aware of any adult fiction produced in the entire seven-decade history of the republic" but only politically oriented works that "demonstrated loyalty, honour, and self-sacrifice for the motherland." The ubiquity of English has had an impact on academic writing as well as commercial books. Scholars worry "that other languages are denuded of the specialist terms needed to express complex ideas and discoveries" by the pressure to write in English. Some fiction writers, striving for publication, try to imitate Western-style novels rather than draw upon their own cultures. Reading indigenous works that evoke a new time and place, thoughlike a hugely popular young-adult series written by a Samoan housewifeconfronted Morgan with ideas and views that felt startlingly fresh. An appendix lists 196 books that the author read on her journey, including selections from Bhutan, Cape Verde, Ivory Coast, Iraq and Sierra Leone; most were published by small, independent presses. Morgan's intrepid literary project underscores the crucial importance of stretching the boundaries of one's aesthetic and intellectual worlds. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Library Journal Review

When journalist Morgan realized she was a "literary xenophobe," she decided to spend 2012 reading (and blogging about) a book-length narrative from each country in the world as, she said, "part-penance, part-prophylactic." Her blog, -ayearofreadingtheworld.com, contains detailed entries on her experiences with each book she chose. This title explores the venture as a concept and as a whole project, addressing the many sticky issues Morgan dealt with along the way: How many countries exist? Says who? What exactly is world literature? What about authenticity? Politics? Censorship? Translations? How does one get books from [insert country here]? How does one read and blog about almost 200 books in one year and still have a job? Should one research a culture, or contextualize a narrative before reading a work? (Morgan says no, in what initially feels like an anti-intellectual attack; her tone gradually tempers.) This would have been a fascinating project to follow as it proceeded. VERDICT Fans of the author's blog may appreciate this in-depth concluding exploration. Readers who are new to the project may be less hooked into the work and might benefit from looking at the blog first. [See Prepub Alert, 11/24/14.]-Audrey Snowden, Orrington P.L., ME © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Bound With These Titles

On Order

Summary

Summary

Author Notes

Reviews (5)

Publisher's Weekly Review

Booklist Review

New York Review of Books Review

Kirkus Review

Library Journal Review

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