Welcome to Flung’s evolving collection of books we love about places that intrigue. Buying any of these books via the links below helps support Flung through Amazon’s affiliate program. With the exception of those listed under the General heading, titles are organized by location. Enjoy!
General
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The Death and Life of Great American Cities
by Jane Jacobs
This meditation on the modern urban space is essential to any understanding of why we love to be in the cities we love, and why other ones leave us wanting.
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Best American Travel Writing 2015
edited by Andrew McCarthy
Highlights include Kevin Baker’s ’21st Century Limited,’ about America’s train system, and Nick Paumgarten’s ‘Berlin Nights,’ about the music scene in that city.
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On the Road
by Jack Kerouac
Kerouac’s best known novel hasn’t necessarily aged well, but it’s impossible to fully understand our fascination with the road trip without it.
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Train
by Tom Zoellner
A mesmerizing history of the rails by an author who loves to ride them. Read an excerpt on Flung.
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Afghanistan
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The Places in Between
by Rory Stewart
In 2002, Stewart undertook a nearly unthinkable trip, walking across Afghanistan in the wake of The US invasion there–during a brutal winter, no less. Great writing and the author’s searing intelligence only make the journey more captivating.[/column]
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Athens
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Outline
by Rachel Cusk
A woman makes a friend on her flight to Athens for a teaching gig. With him and others, she turns the city into a backdrop for musings on love, work and futility. Read Flung’s review of the novel.
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Bangkok
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Bangkok Days
by Lawrence Osborne
In this memoir, an English expat settles into Bangkok’s wallet-friendly assortment of sordid diversions. Observations are richly detailed and Osborne’s participation in the city’s seedier elements keep far enough on the fringe that you’re willing to stick with him.
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Botswana
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Mating
by Norman Rush
Western ideals of gender relations get put through the ringer by both the American academics doing their thing in Botswana, and by the matriarchal society one of them has founded there.
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Brooklyn
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The Fortress of Solitude
by Jonathan Lethem
Growing up in Boerum Hill before it was Boerum Hill gives the protagonist of this novel, very closely based on Lethem himself, a window onto the forces that would eventually situate Brooklyn at the center of 21st century culture.
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The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.
by Adelle Waldman
Nate is pretentious and self-aggrandizing and an unwitting womanizer–a perfect specimen of contemporary ‘Brooklyn.’
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10:04
by Ben Lerner
Experience Brooklyn, then Marfa, then Brooklyn again through the eyes of a neurotic, and very good, writer.[/column]
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Congo
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Broken Glass
by Alain Mabanckou
At a dive bar in Congo, a regular with no filter takes down a record of the stories that fellow patrons have told him over drink after drink, after drink.
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India
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Behind the Beautiful Forevers
by Katherine Boo
Boo spent three years immersed in a sprawling slum next to the Mumbai airport; the striving, impoverished, heartbreaking cast of characters she met makes for nonfiction that reads like a novel.
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Istanbul
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The Museum of Innocence
by Orhan Pamuk
In 1970’s Istanbul, a great love affair endures even as it is doomed by the dictates of a culture caught between tradition and modernity.
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Las Vegas
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The Goldfinch
by Donna Tart
There’s a lot of New York City in this novel, too, but it’s the middle section set in the thinned out would-be suburbs of Las Vegas that we keep coming back to.
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London
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On the Floor
by Aifric Campbell
The author became the first female managing director on the floor of the London Stock Exchange in the 1980’s. This novel sends up the finance industry of that heady era with a delightful irreverence.
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London Fields
by Martin Amis
Here is turn-of-the-millennium London as envisioned by Amis a decade prior to it. Amis is nastily funny in this story of an American writer caught up with a seedy anti-heroine who knows the exact day she will be murdered.
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NW
by Zadie Smith
Two childhood besties confront diverging paths in their adulthood–one woman has cast off her personal history in the northwest section of London, the other has embraced it. Supporting characters make the neighborhood milieu all the richer.
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Los Angeles
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Play It as It Lays
by Joan Didion
Her fiction gets the lion’s share of attention, but this novel about a morally adrift woman’s decaying LA life is as trenchant as any of Didion’s essays.
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Mexico City
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The Savage Detectives
by Roberto Bolaño
This three-part novel centers on a group of radical poets living in Mexico city in the 1970s in search of the founder of their movement. Sounds precious, but couldn’t be less so.
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New York City
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Just Kids
by Patti Smith
The singer’s memoir takes readers to the Chelsea Hotel, Max’s Kansas City, and a slew of other long-gone landmarks from downtown’s edgy, arty heyday in the 1960’s and 70’s.
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The Age of Innocence
by Edith Wharton
Yes, this novel is an ingenious takedown of the 19th century upper class, and a chronicle of the love affair that it dooms, but the charms of New York’s drawing rooms are too much to resist, nonetheless.
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Lush Life
by Richard Price
Price masterfully intermingles the myriad groups coexisting in the Lower East Side, creating a masterpiece of urban literature around the catalyst of a late-night robbery gone wrong.
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Nigeria
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Things Fall Apart
by Chinua Achebe
This essential 1958 novel tells the story of village leader Okonkwo and his struggle to adapt to the changing dynamics of his native culture brought about by the arrival of Europeans.
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Paris
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Lost Illusions
by Honore de Balzac
A country boy with grand aspirations heads to 19th century Paris and infiltrates the beau monde.
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A Moveable Feast
by Ernest Hemingway
This legendary memoir often serves as the point of entry for Americans reading about Paris, and we see no reason to take issue with that.
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Trinidad
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Miguel Street
by V.S. Naipaul
The tale of a child’s bittersweet upbringing in Trinidad’s capital, Port of Spain, in the early-mid-twentieth century.[/column]
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