Cover of Letters of Transit: Reflections on Exile, Identity, Language, and Loss

Letters of Transit: Reflections on Exile, Identity, Language, and Loss

"Moving, deeply introspective and honest" (Publishers Weekly) reflections on exile and memory from five award-winning authors. All of the authors in Letters of Transithave written award-winning works on exile, home, and memory, using the written word as a tool for revisiting their old homes or fashioning new ones. Now in paperback are five newly commissioned essays offering moving distillations of their most important thinking on these themes. Andre Aciman traces his migrations and compares his own transience with the uprootedness of many moderns. Eva Hoffman examines the crucial role of language and what happens when your first one is lost. Edward Said defends his conflicting political and cultural allegiances. Novelist Bharati Mukherjee explores her own struggle with assimilation. Finally, Charles Simic remembers his thwarted attempts at "fitting in" in America.

Audience
adult
Length
short · 144 pages

Click a tag to see books like this one that share it. Point at it (on a phone, tap it) for less of it instead.

Read it? Sign in to help tag it.

Liked Letters of Transit: Reflections on Exile, Identity, Language, and Loss? Here’s where I’d start.

These suit anyone who liked Letters of Transit: Reflections on Exile, Identity, Language, and Loss. Sign in and mark a few books for picks shaped around your own taste.

  1. Bradbury Speaks: Too Soon from the Cave, Too Far from the Stars Shares essays, nonfiction, writing
  2. Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere Shares essays, nonfiction, travel
  3. Drifting House
  4. Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and U.S. Interests in the Middle East since1945 Shares nonfiction, history

“People who read Letters of Transit: Reflections on Exile, Identity, Language, and Loss tend to reach for these next.”

  1. An Introduction to Historical Linguistics
  2. To the Holy Shrines
  3. The Future of Nostalgia
  4. The Five-Minute Linguist: Bite-Sized Essays on Language and Languages

“If you want more of the same (biography about writers), start with these.”

  1. Selected Essays
  2. The Lost Origins of the Essay
  3. Quotidiana: Essays
  4. Essayism

“If it was the essays that hooked you, try one of these.”

  1. More Curious
  2. Essays of E.B. White
  3. Somebody with a Little Hammer: Essays
  4. Caca Dolce: Essays from a Lowbrow Life

“These start from a similar idea, even if they go somewhere else with it.”

  1. Something to Declare
  2. The Cushion in the Road: Meditation and Wandering as the Whole World Awakens to Being in Harm's Way
  3. The Writer as Migrant
  4. These Honored Dead: How The Story Of Gettysburg Shaped American Memory