City at Three P.M.: Writing, Reading, and Traveling - Softcover

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"Armchair travelers and literary types will relish the descriptions of both the author, his travels, and the admired writers." --Library Journal

"LaSalle shows himself to be a smart and open writer with a restless intellect and infectious passion for travel and literature."--Publishers Weekly

"These are travel pieces ... but they use travel mainly as a portal to literary celebration."--Kirkusl

"It seems like the love of literature might be enough. But LaSalle is trying to do something else in these trips. He's trying to find meaning, in a Borgesian kind of way." --Austin American-Statesman

"LaSalles's dreamlike sense of exploration through past and present, memory and loss, the mundane and the profound, not only keeps the reader on the brink of discovery but also paints a picture far more vivid than any standard travel narrative." --Ploughshares (online)

"The essays in The City bespeak enthusiasm, optimism, appreciation, energy . . . . LaSalle is that rare writer of supremely readable prose who also has genuine respect for the lyrical." --The Texas Observer

"LaSalle's book is undeniably entertaining, but more importantly, it demonstrates an invaluable inquisitiveness. The City at Three P.M. ratchets up curiosity about the world from a cultural standpoint and also illuminates the realities of politics, war, and various forms of oppression." --The Literary Review (online)

"LaSalle's stories are full of detail, and he knows how to create a sense of place, be it Buenos Aires, Austin, Texas, Paris, or Boston."--Atlanta Journal-Constitution on Tell Borges If You See Him

"Peter LaSalle has worked his way deep into the storytelling place. Serious, anomalous, his narratives are set into motion by the obsessions and perturbations of living. There is no model, no recipe--each world is uniquely known and irresistibly defined."--Sven Birkerts, author of Reading Life: Books for the Ages on Tell Borges If You See Him

"LaSalle's command of the language is admirable, but even more admirable is his moral vision."--Dallas Times-Herald on Strange Sunlight

In The City at Three PM, award-winning fiction writer Peter LaSalle offers 11 startlingly original personal essays dealing with his longtime quest for world travel of the literary sort.

The range of offbeat experiences is wide--from driving recklessly across the county when young to seek out Saul Bellow in Chicago, to settling in for long evenings at a pub in Dublin with Christy Brown, the celebrated Irish author afflicted with cerebral palsy who typed with his toes and was the subject of the movie My Left Foot.

In Buenos Aires LaSalle senses metaphysical transport while investigating Borges's work; in Cameroon he attends the wonderful opening of a small bookstore; in Hollywood he finds himself caught in a crazy mob scene while researching the work of 1930s master novelist and screenwriter Nathanael West; in Tunisia he follows in the footsteps of Flaubert at the ruins of ancient Carthage. And those are just some of the adventures.

Having first appeared in distinguished publications here and abroad, including The Best American Travel Writing, these are beautifully crafted pieces--heartfelt, honest, observant--that conjure up those fine moments when travel does intersect with the important role of literature in our lives.