Outside Stories

Unpredictable and uncanonical, Eliot Weinbergers essays are the outside stories of cultural migrations. The fifteen pieces collected here range from the history of the Salman Rushdie affair to the dream of Atlantis, from the turf wars among ethnographic filmmakers to the unlikely romance between poetry and espionage, from the pilgrims in Plymouth to the students in Tiananmen Square. Above all, Weinbergers concern is poetrywhether written in medieval Baghdad or by Mexicans in Japanand the perennially underground yet global network through which it travels. With his modernist sensibility and internationalist perspective, Weinbergers inventive prose transports old myths and texts to the strange realities of contemporary life.