Eighty Titles

 In his literary cartography, Damrosch includes contemporary works, perennial classics, hard-bitten crime fiction and haunting works of fantasy, and the formative tales that introduce us as children to the world we're entering. These eighty titles offer us fresh perspective on enduring problems, from the social consequences of epidemics to the rising inequality that Thomas More designed Utopia to combat, as well as 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 Margaret Atwood today.

Following a literary itinerary from London to Venice, Tehran and points beyond, and via authors from Woolf and Dante to Nobel Prize-winners Orhan Pamuk, Wole Soyinka, Mo Yan, and Olga Tokarczuk, he explores how these works have shaped our idea of the world, and the ways in which the world bleeds ...