Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

In Maps of the Imagination , Peter Turchi posits the idea that maps help people understand where they are in the world in the same way that literature, whether realistic or experimental, attempts to explain human realities. The author explores how writers and cartographers use many of the same devices for plotting and executing their work, making crucial decisions about what to include and what to leave out, in order to get from here to there, without excess baggage or a confusing surplus of information. Turchi traces the history of maps, from their initial decorative and religious purposes to their later instructional applications. He describes how maps rely on projections in order to portray a three-dimensional world on the two-dimensional flat surface of paper, which he then relates to what writers do in projecting a literary work from the imagination onto the page.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

This is a gorgeous book in every way. Turchi links maps, both literal and figurative, to literature and shows how each form echoes and illuminates the other. With the aid of an array of beautiful maps (depicting systems ranging from the London Underground to the caverns of moles) and quotations ranging from Sappho to Robert Louis Stevenson, Turchi investigates the concepts of blank space, conventions, and geometric rules. He amply demonstrates the similarity between the ways maps and literature shape worldviews, ways one never thinks about, and how both reflect needs and beliefs rather than reality. He points out, for example, that both maps and fiction are understandable because they are selective: a map does not try to represent every fire hydrant (such a map would be unusable) and fiction (even realistic fiction) does not include characters' every action and thought. Some of Turchi's ideas will be familiar, but the depth of his investigation and the immense array of his sources cast new light on even familiar theories. In addition, his writing is engaging, intelligent, and never jargon laden; this book wears its vast learning lightly. ^BSumming Up: Essential. All collections; all levels. A. Castaldo Widener University

Booklist Review

It's not uncommon to compare the writing of a story to the mapping of a world, but no one has so fully, or so seductively and rewardingly, performed as extended a meditation on this illuminating metaphor as Turchi. A fiction writer, anthologist, and the director of the MFA writing program at Warren Wilson College, Turchi parses with equal insight, knowledge, and elan the making of maps and the writing of fiction. Both involve purposeful omission; both require compression; both are subjective in their perspective, orientation, and emphasis; and both create illusions. Turchi's lively, idiosyncratic, and marvelously well-illustrated history of mapmaking (many cartographic quests are as quixotic as any in literature) is matched by reverie-inducing selections from Melville, Stevenson, Nabokov, Calvino, and Carver, as well as priceless musings on the Marx Brothers and the Road Runner. Ultimately, Turchi contrasts realistic and postrealistic approaches to storytelling, and concludes, Reality is inexhaustible. Brilliant and pleasurable, Turchi's musing on our innate need to know where we are, where we might go, and why alters our perceptions of not only maps and fiction but also the nature of the mind's terra incognita. --Donna Seaman Copyright 2004 Booklist