Introduction: Travel and Its Objects 1. Luggage and Secrets 2. The Language of Luggage 3. Packing 4. My Luggage 5. Lost Luggage: Alabama's Unclaimed Baggage Center Acknowledgments List of Illustrations Notes Index
You can’t think about travel without thinking about luggage—and, as Susan Harlan shows, baggage has baggage.
Susan Harlan is Associate Professor of English at Wake Forest University, USA. She is the author of Memories of War in Early Modern England (2016). Her writing has appeared in publications including the Guardian, the Awl, the Bitter Southerner, Jezebel, and Atlas Obscura.
In this welcome addition to Bloomsbury's Object Lessons series,
author Susan Harlan packs just enough in her sturdy devices to
finish this trip on time and under budget … What is luggage? What
is baggage? Are they interchangeable terms, or does the former
exist only because it started as the latter? Is a backpack luggage?
Questions are asked and answered.
*PopMatters*
In this short, delicious little extended essay, author Susan Harlan
takes a closer look at our luggage, why we have it, why we use it
as we do … Brisk writing threads pensive musings about our luggage
with the author’s use of her own on one of her many business trips.
What we choose to take, which bags and what to pack, their shape
and size and appearance and more, all have a lot to say about who
we are. Who knew a few bags could have such deep psychological
implications? Five stars.
*San Francisco Book Review*
Susan Harlan writes with empathy and erudition about the things we
lug, haul, pack, and leave behind. This little book — compact
enough to throw in your carry-on for your next flight — is edifying
and entertaining in equal measures. I loved it.
*Rosie Schaap, author of Drinking With Men*
For those of us who travel for a living, luggage is all things in
one: tool, companion, talisman. I think about luggage a lot.
Probably too much. But I’ve never read anything that — forgive me
here — unpacks the history and meaning of luggage with the same
depth and verve as Susan Harlan does. From Shakespeare’s Henry V to
an oddly compelling contemporary visit to Alabama’s Unclaimed
Baggage Center, this slim volume is worth the journey.
*Nathan Thornburgh, Co-founder of Roads & Kingdoms*
An intimate look at suitcases, trunks, totes, and other baggage,
Luggage illuminates the intricacies of how we carry our lives with
us when we travel … Harlan’s exploration of the minutiae of luggage
makes for introspection … Harlan mines the life of things we pay
little attention to, or simply don’t recall, and calls up nostalgia
through the memory of objects.
*Brevity*
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