Laura van den Berg is the author of two story collections, What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us and The Isle of Youth, and the novel Find Me. Her fiction has received the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters, the Bard Fiction Prize, an O. Henry Award, and a MacDowell Colony fellowship.Her new novel is The Third Hotel.
Recently I asked van den Berg about what she was reading. Her reply:
I’ve been reading Andrés Neuman’s How to Travel Without Seeing: Dispatches from the New Latin America—while travelingVisit Laura van den Berg's website.myself, which seems fitting. After winning the Premio Alfaguara, Neuman is sent on a tour of nineteen countries in Latin America and the resulting book is akin to a writer’s travel journal, in the best way: spontaneous, haunting, mordantly funny, perceptive, lyric. As a writer who is very interested in transit spaces myself, I especially appreciated Neuman’s writing on hotels, planes, and taxis, the kinds of places we often pass through without much consideration and yet spaces that are rich with their own temperaments and histories and weathers. How to Travel Without Seeing is the perfect late summer travel companion.
--Marshal Zeringue
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