How to Talk About Places You’ve Never Been: On the Importance of Armchair Travel

Written in the irreverent style that made How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read a critical and commercial success, Pierre Bayard takes readers on a trip around the world, giving us essential guidance on how to talk about all those fantastic places we’ve never been. Practical, funny, and thought-provoking, How to Talk About Places You’ve Never Been will delight and inform armchair globetrotters and jet-setters, all while never having to leave the comfort of the living room.

Bayard examines the art of the non-journey, a tradition that a succession of writers and thinkers, unconcerned with moving away from their home turf, have employed in order to encounter the foreign cultures they wish to know and talk about. He describes concrete situations in which the reader might find himself having to speak about places he’s never been, and he chronicles some of his own experiences and offers practical advice.

How to Talk About Places You’ve Never Been is a compelling and delightful book that will expand any travel enthusiast’s horizon well beyond the places it’s even possible to visit in a single lifetime.

Pierre Bayard is a professor of French literature at the University of Paris 8 and a psychoanalyst. He is the author of Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?, How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read, and Sherlock Holmes Was Wrong, among many others. He lives in Paris, France.