In 1790, Xavier de Maistre was 27 years old, and a soldier in the army of the Sardinian Kingdom, which covered swathes of modern-day Northern Italy and Southern France. He was placed under house-arrest in Turin for fighting an illegal duel. It was during the 42 days of his confinement here that he wrote the manuscript that would become Voyage autour de ma chambre. Inspired by the works of Laurence Sterne, with their digressive and colloquial style, de Maistre decided to make the most of his sentence by recording an exploration of the room as a travel journal. de Maistre’s book imbues the tour of his chamber with great mythology and grand scale. As he wanders the few steps that it takes to circumnavigate the space, his mind spins off into the ether. It parodies the travel journals of the eighteenth-century (such as A Voyage Around the World by Louis de Bougainville, 1771), and could be read today as an early take on the modern vogue for “psychogeography” — each tiny thing that he encounters sends de Maistre into rhapsodies, and mundane journeys become magnificent voyages.

A lively and utterly singular travelogue of the intricate curiosities that are directly within one’s own reach In 1790, while serving in the Piedmontese army, the French aristocrat Xavier de Maistre (1763–1852) was punished for dueling and placed under house arrest for forty-two days. The result was a discursive, mischievous memoir Voyage Around My Room, and its sequel, Nocturnal Expedition Around My Room. Admired by Nietzsche and Machado de Assis, Ossian and Susan Sontag, this classic book proves that sitting on the living-room sofa can be as fascinating as crossing the Alps or paddling up the Amazon. In addition to the Voyage and Expedition, this edition also includes the dialogue “The Leper of the City of Aosta,” a preface by Xavier’s better-known older brother (the royalist philosopher Joseph de Maistre), and an introduction by Richard Howard.

What do you do when you find yourself imprisoned in your room for 6 weeks? Xavier de Maistre, a 27-year-old Frenchman found himself in this uneasy situation when he was arrested in Turin after a duel, in the Spring of 1790. But with only a butler and a dog for company, Xavier de Maistre managed to fill his time by embarking on a journey around his bedroom, later writing an account of what he had seen. Whether venturing from his bed to his sofa, or even to his mirror, he wears his "traveling outfit”--his favorite pink and blue pajamas. Out of his forced reclusion comes a captivating fantasy--a novel take on travel literature that would inspire many later writers, including Marcel Proust. This edition also contains de Maistre’s A Nocturnal Expedition around My Room. Xavier de Maistre was a military man, who supplemented his army career with short works of fiction.

Armchair travel may seem like an oxymoron. Doesn’t travel require us to leave the house? And yet, anyone who has lost herself for hours in the descriptive pages of a novel or the absorbing images of a film knows the very real feeling of having explored and experienced a different place or time without ever leaving her seat. No passport, no currency, no security screening required—the luxury of armchair travel is accessible to us all. In Traveling in Place, Bernd Stiegler celebrates this convenient, magical means of transport in all its many forms. Organized into twenty-one “legs”—or short chapters—Traveling in Place begins with a consideration of Xavier de Maistre’s 1794 Voyage autour de ma chambre, an account of the forty-two-day “journey around his room” Maistre undertook as a way to entertain himself while under house arrest. Stiegler is fascinated by the notion of exploring the familiar as though it were completely new and strange. He engages writers as diverse as Roussel, Beckett, Perec, Robbe-Grillet, Cortázar, Kierkegaard, and Borges, all of whom show how the everyday can be brilliantly transformed. Like the best guidebooks, Traveling in Place is more interested in the idea of travel as a state of mind than as a physical activity, and Stiegler reflects on the different ways that traveling at home have manifested themselves in the modern era, from literature and film to the virtual possibilities of the Internet, blogs, and contemporary art. Reminiscent of the pictorial meditations of Sebald, but possessed of the intellectual playfulness of Calvino, Traveling in Place offers an entertaining and creative Baedeker to journeying at home.

When the nuclear-powered submarine USS Triton was commissioned in November 1959, its commanding officer, Captain Edward L. Beach, planned a routine shakedown cruise in the North Atlantic. Two weeks before the scheduled cruise, however, Beach was summoned to Washington and told of the immediate necessity to prove the reliability of the Rickover-conceived submarine. His new secret orders were to take the Triton around the world, entirely submerged the total distance. This is Beach's gripping firsthand account of what went on during the 36,000 nautical-mile voyage whose record for speed and endurance still stands today. It brings to life the many tense events in the historic journey: the malfunction of the essential fathometer that indicated the location of undersea mountains and shallow waters, the sudden agonizing illness of a senior petty officer, and the serious problems with the ship's main hydraulic oil system. Intensely dramatic, Beach's chronicle also describes the psychological stresses of the journey and some touching moments shared by the crew. A skillful story teller, he recounts the experience in such detail that readers feel they have been along for the ride of a lifetime.

'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.

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