Travel & Mirage: The Lure of Place

Noted memoirist, essayist, and scholar André Aciman will use Rome and other destinations to explore how travel changes us, and how our perceptions of a place derive from our own unique experiences. Like Narcissus, we seek to find our mirror self in the exploration of the world. We each perceive the world through the lens of our own characteristics, tastes, and flaws. We may think we are discovering new things; what we’re really doing is inventing them.

André Aciman’s memoir, Out of Egypt (1995), an account of his childhood as a Jew growing up in post-colonial Egypt, received the Whiting Writers’ Award. Aciman is the author of three novels, including Call Me By Your Name (2007), for which he won a Lambda Literary Award in 2008. His most recent novel is Harvard Square. His essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, The New Republic, Condé Nast Traveler, The Paris Review, and Granta, as well as in many volumes of The Best American Essays. Aciman is currently working on his next novel.

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