On Friday August 19, Andrés Neuman, author of How to Travel without Seeing, will run one of the Edinburgh International Book Festival's Reading Workshops, on Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quixote. It will be followed at 7:30 by a solo author event with Neuman on his own work.
The aim of Reading Workshops is to have a contemporary writer discuss a specific book in some detail and help the audience on their reading journey with a close examination of a classic text. Each ninety-minute session will help readers to equip themselves with skills and understanding that will be of benefit to their personal reading. Previous years’ events included John Mullan on Mansfield Park, Colm Toibin on Sons & Lovers, Debi Gliori on The Moomins, Charlie Fletcher on Treasure Island, Keith Gray on The Wasp Factory, and Stuart Kelly on the Batman series. TThe workshops come from a personal viewpoint and give our audiences insights into how a particular work of fiction has inspired or influenced contemporary writers. The audience is limited to twenty-five in order to allow plenty of opportunity for discussion.
The Edinburgh International Book Festival began in 1983 and is now a key event in the August Festival season, celebrated annually in Scotland's capital city. Biennial at first, the Book Festival became a yearly celebration in 1997.
When: Friday, August 19, 2016 at 1:00 pm
Where: Edinburgh International Book Festival, Garden Theatre, Edinburgh, Scotland, United Kingdom
By Andrés Neuman
Translated from the Spanish by Jeffrey Lawrence
“The most breathtaking voice in travel writing today may be that of a writer who feels ambivalent about travel itself…. ‘Perhaps the greatest travel book, the most unpredictable of all,’ Andrés Neuman suggests in the closing paragraphs of How to Travel Without Seeing: Dispatches from the New Latin America, ‘would be written by someone who doesn’t go anywhere and simply imagines possible movements. Facing a window that seems like a platform, the author would lift his head and feel the rush of the horizon.’ It’s a line that operates as both valedictory and epigraph…. As How to Travel Without Seeing progresses, it increasingly functions... as a set of vignettes, reflections, shards of memory or observation that add up in the only way such fragments can, as an approximation of consciousness…. This is what it means to travel now.”
—David Ullin, Barnes & Noble Review
Paperback • ISBN: 9781632060556
Publication date: Aug 30, 2016