This work explores the legend behind Daniel Defoe's classic novel, visiting possible places where this famous literary character could have been marooned. It also re-examines the claim that Crusoe was based on a real life castaway, Alexander Selkirk.

They inspire feelings of great passion, serenity, and sometimes fear . . . they give people the opportunity to find themselves--or to lose their minds . . . they are revered as paradise or treated as junkyards . . . both haunted by and respectful of history . . . they are central to the myths and religions of many peoples throughout time . . . they provide a real, friendly community or the hell of repetitive social encounters . . . What is it about islands that has captivated millions of people around the world and through the centuries? In a penetrating, brilliantly written book that weaves sociology, history, politics, personality, and ancient and popular culture into one compelling narrative, Thurston Clarke island-hops around the oceans of the world, searching for an explanation for the most passionate and enduring geographic love affair of all time--between humankind and islands. Along the way Clarke visits the remote and silent Mas À Tierra, the island off the coast of Chile that inspired Defoe to write Robinson Crusoe; tropical Banda Neira, one of the Spice Islands, where its self-crowned prince hopes for nothing less than nutmeg's complete and glorious revival; sleepy, simple Campobello, the Canadian island where Franklin D. Roosevelt spent his boyhood summers; Patmos, with its imposing mountaintop monastery; Malekula, once the most notorious cannibal island in the world; and Jura in Scotland's Hebrides, where George Orwell wrote 1984--the island that turned Clarke into a islomane, someone Lawrence Durrell says experiences an "indescribable intoxication" at finding himself in "a little world surrounded by the sea." Despite colonialism and missionary conversions, wartime scars and shrinking coasts, islands have thrived. Though each island is unique in its own way, Clarke discovers that the islanders themselves are a distinct people-- tranquilized by their watery horizons yet sensitive to the first shift in weather, conservative yet more likely to drop their inhibitions because no one is looking. And over every island falls the shadow of Robinson Crusoe, persuading us that islands are more liberating than confining, more contemplative than lonely, more holy than barbaric because we have been "removed from all the wickedness of the world." In a stunning work of wit, adventure, and incisive exploration, Thurston Clarke brings a unique passion to dazzling life.

Whether writing about waiting as a child in a dentist's office, viewing a city from a plane high above, or losing items ranging from door keys to one's lover in the masterfully restrained "One Art," Elizabeth Bishop somehow conveyed both large and small emotional truths in language of stunning exactitude and even more astonishing resonance. As John Ashbery has written, "The private self . . . melts imperceptibly into the large utterance, the grandeur of poetry, which, because it remains rooted in everyday particulars, never sounds ‘grand,' but is as quietly convincing as everyday speech."

In Trickster Makes This World, Lewis Hyde brings to life the playful and disruptive side of human imagination as it is embodied in trickster mythology. He first visits the old stories—Hermes in Greece, Eshu in West Africa, Krishna in India, Coyote in North America, among others—and then holds them up against the lives and work of more recent creators: Picasso, Duchamp, Ginsberg, John Cage, and Frederick Douglass. Twelve years after its first publication, Trickster Makes This World—authoritative in its scholarship, loose-limbed in its style—has taken its place among the great works of modern cultural criticism. This new edition includes an introduction by Michael Chabon.

Robinson Crusoe explores Defoe's story, the legend it captured, the universal desire which underlies the myth and a range of modern re-writings which reveal a continued fascination with the problematic character of this narrative. Whether envisaged as an heroic rejection of the old world order, a piece of pre-colonialist propaganda or a tale raising archetypal problems of 'otherness' and 'inequality', the mythic value of Crusoe has become a pretext over many centuries for an examination of some of the fundamental problems of existence. This collection of essays examines, from a wide range of critical and philosophical perspectives, the cultural manifestations of Robinson Crusoe in different centuries, in different media, in different genres.

Defoe occupies a central place in the history of English literature. As the author of Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders he can claim to be the creator of the first novels in English, and he was one of the earliest practitioners of the 'desert island' myth which has had such an influence on the human imagination. In A Journal of the Plague Year and A Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain he forged a distinctive documentary style which deeply influenced later writers.