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Book

The romance of elsewhere : essays

Call Number

  • 824 F8534 (CEN)

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Publication Information

Berkeley, CA : Counterpoint, 2017.

Physical Description

208 pages ; 22 cm

Uniform Title

Essays. Selections

Summary

"Lynn Freed's deeply personal essays explore our most quintessential question: What makes a home? From very early on she had imagined for herself an ideal life: a stranger in a strange place: someone just arrived, just about to leave, and always with a home to return to. As a teenager on an exchange program to the U.S., she had made up fantastic reasons to escape high school in the suburbs and spend her time in New York City. Accepting a marriage proposal as a young woman, partly because it promised just such a life - away from South Africa, where she'd grown up, and in New York as a graduate student - she found herself both restless and unmoored. At home neither in the place nor in the marriage. What she did find, in the end, was a true marriage between writing and travel, travel and identity. Traversing decades and continents and back again, The Romance of Elsewhere captures the dilemma of the expat and does so with Freed's signature honesty and humor. She takes on subjects as disparate as Disneyland, lovers, eco-tourism, shopping, serious illness, and the anomaly of writers who blossom into full power only in old age. Lynn has been publishing these pieces for the past three decades, and this new collection further establishes her as a renowned voice in memoir and the exploration of identity"--

Contents

  • The romance of elsewhere
  • Keeping watch
  • Useful Zulu phrases, 1986
  • Gloria mundi
  • Multiple choice
  • Letter from London
  • Caveat viator
  • It's a small, unnatural world
  • The beach of the lost world
  • Honky, Napoleon, & the Empress Wu
  • Inheriting the past
  • A stranger in my house
  • Viva Mandela!
  • Running the smalls through
  • Locked in
  • Happy birthday to me
  • Ignorance chic
  • Letter from Texas
  • Doing no harm : some thoughts on reading and writing in the age of umbrage
  • When enough is enough : age and the creative impulse.

Subjects