“Edward Thomas’s biographer Matthew Hollis gives [The Guardian's] Sarah Crown a tour of landmarks of Steep, Hampshire, where the first world war poet lived and worked. Hollis discusses Thomas’s life and writing in the tiny village and explains how the area shaped the poet’s work. He also explores the influence on Thomas of American poet Robert Frost”

When First I Came Here

Edward Thomas

Kurt Vonnegut was born in Indianapolis in 1922. Early on, his family made a fortune selling hardware in the city.  His grandfather  chose however to become an architect  and designed Das Deutsche Haus, praised as “the best preserved and most elaborate building associated with the German American community of Indianapolis.”  It’s name was changed to “Athenaeum” in the early part of the 20th century, because of anti-German sentiment .Vonnegut’s father, following his father,  designed many important art deco style buildings in the city.

Vonnegut grew up on Illinois Street and attended James Whitcomb Riley School.  Visit the Vonnegut Room in the Athenaeum when next you’re in town, and be sure to stop in at the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library located in the historic Emelie Building  downtown at 340 N. Senate Avenue

The Petőfi Literary Museum was founded in 1954 to collect and preserve Hungarian literature. The name of the Museum presented itself naturally, since the poesy of Sándor Petőfi, who died young in the 1848–49 War of Independence, symbolises Hungarian poetry to the general reader both within and beyond the borders of the country. As legal successor of the Petőfi House,  the mandate was to continue to protect the Petőfi legacy and, at the same time, expand its purview. Functioning as an exhibition and research centre from 1909 until 1945, Petőfi House was established partly with the intention of fostering the Petőfi cult, and partly because important authorial documents were not at the time being collected by other libraries, museums and archives

Petőfi manuscripts, books and relics were collected, and the Bajza Street house of Petőfi’s fellow-writer, the popular novelist, Mór Jókai and its considerable collection of Jókai material was purchased. From the 1950s onwards Petőfi House also collected the documents of two outstanding figures of 20th-century Hungarian poetry: Attila József and Endre Ady. This resulted in the Petőfi House outgrowing its premises, which in turn precipitated the establishment of  a new, independent literary museum,  the task of which was  to process and preserve existing collections using modern techniques, and to collect materials of museum value from contemporary Hungarian literature.

As Kate Kellaway reports in the Guardian:

“Dorset has always been prominent on the literary map (John Fowles, Jane Austen, Thomas Hardy) but Ian McEwan is, I think, the first novelist to write about Chesil Beach – and his novel stands out on the literary map. His choice of place was, McEwan explains, close to compulsion: “Love, chance or utility bring a novelist to a choice of place. A mix of the first and third shaped On Chesil Beach. This unique coast is both beautiful and inhospitable (to the hiker, swimmer and sailor). My young lovers, poised before the unknown, needed to be where the land meets the sea. For their final scene, I wanted them trapped between the lagoon and the English Channel. At the end of their conversation, the young woman walks away from her husband, never to see him again – she recedes along this difficult terrain, as though fixed on her course in life, with no way back. I convinced myself that there was nowhere else in England where this novel could take place.”

In the best novels this is how it is: place and content are mutually dependent: they can’t exist separately. And place is seldom arbitrary.”

British Library website says: “From William Blake to the 21st-century suburban hinterlands of J G Ballard, Writing Britain [ 11 May - 25 September, 2012] examines how the landscapes of Britain permeate great literary works. It will allow visitors to read between the lines of great works of English literature, discovering the secrets and stories surrounding the works’ creation, shedding new light on how they speak to the country today.

Over 150 literary works, including many first-time loans from overseas and directly from authors: sound recordings, videos, letters, photographs, maps, song lyrics and drawings – as well as manuscripts and printed editions.”

As Blake Morrison describes it in the Guardian: “If the Hockney and Hirst exhibitions are the British art world’s contribution to 2012, in literature it’s the exhibition being mounted at the British Library. Writing Britain: Wastelands to Wonderlands will display 150 works spanning 1,000 years – books, manuscripts, letters, sound recordings, videos, photos, maps, drawings. The exhibition doesn’t pretend to be linear or completist – 150 items in a single room cannot allow for a comprehensive history of our literature. But the hope is that the show will allow visitors “to read between the lines of great works of English literature, discovering the secrets and stories surrounding the works’ creation”.

The Knut Hamsun Centre in Hamarøy, Norway. Architect: Steven Holl.

Literary tour company Classical Pursuits has a trip planned to Vietnam later on this year.  Recommended reading includes Vietnam: A Traveler’s Literary Companion, several stories from contemporary Vietnamese writers living in Vietnam and abroad, and The Headmaster’s Wager by Vincent Lam.

In addition to these, you might also want to consider some of the books recommended by Nancy Pearl in Book Lust. She says that David Halberstam’s two books about the Vietnam War ( The Making of a Quagmire: America and Vietnam during the Kennedy Era, and The Best and the Brightest) are two of the best she’s read on the topic. The Pulitzer Prize winning Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and Americans in Vietnam by Frances FitzGerald is described as a readable explanation of why American victory was impossible. Neil Sheehan’s National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize winning book A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam, tells the story of an outspoken combatant, and finally, Tim O’Brien’s novels The Things They Carried, Going After Cacciato, and In the Lake of the Woods are singled out for their raw, intense depiction of outrage and pain.

• A Model World and Other Stories by Michael Chabon
• Iron City by Lloyd L. Brown
• Riot by William Trautmann
• Out of This Furnace by Thomas Bell
• The Mysteries of Pittsburgh by Michael Chabon
• Wonder Boys by Michael Chabon
• Burning Valley (novel) by Philip Bonosky
• The Homewood Books by John Edgar Wideman
• Blood on the Forge by William Attaway
• Captains and Kings by Taylor Caldwell
• The Man Who Liked Slow Tomatoes by K.C. Constantine
• Taken (novel) by Kathleen George
• The Odds by Kathleen George
• Another Kind of Monday by William Coles
• Christine by Stephen King
• Brothers and Keepers by John Edgar Wideman
• Sent for You Yesterday by John Edgar Wideman
• An American Childhood by Annie Dillard
• The Memory Keeper’s Daughter
• Lethal Legacy by Gerald Myers
• Three Golden Rivers by Olive Price
• Watch Your Mouth by Daniel Handler
• Duffy’s Rocks by Edward Fenton
• Greenhorn on the Frontier by Ann Finlayson
• The Tempering by Gloria Skurzynski
• Disquiet Heart by Randall Silvis
• The Last Chicken in America byEllen Litman
• American Rust by Philipp Meyer