Around the World in Fifty Books: Collected Essays on Contemporary Writers

Bringing together fifty essays on contemporary writers, this volume may be seen as a symbolic map intended to help the reader better understand today’s literature. With a sometimes playful or ironic and other times insightful attitude, this collection of texts follows, in a way, as its title suggests, Jules Verne’s example of travelling around the world; this time, symbolically: not in eighty days, but in fifty books—perhaps more like Julio Cortázar, in his “Around the Day in Eighty Worlds”. Our intellectual journey covers a wide cultural space, from Portugal, France and the UK to the USA and Japan, reading or re-reading modern and postmodern novels, short-stories or memoirs, with the aim of finding new meanings even within certain well-known texts. A thought-provoking approach to world literature, this book intends to offer original perspectives and a fresh glimpse on contemporary fiction, taking into account literary geography and also a personal interpretation of some relevant writings published in recent decades.