Reviews of Maps of the Imagination:
              The Writer as Cartographer
   A gorgeous book in every way...(Turchi's) writing is engaging, intelligent, and never jargon laden; this book wears its vast learning lightly.

       --A. Castaldo
          ALA Choice
BOOKLIST
September 15, 2004
*STARRED REVIEW*
      
      It's not uncommon to compare the writing of a story to the mapping of a world, but no one has so fully, or so seductively and rewardingly, performed as extended a meditation on this illuminating metaphor as Turchi.  A fiction writer, anthologist, and the director of the MFA writing program at Warren Wilson College, Turchi parses with equal insight, knowledge, and elan the making of maps and the writing of fiction. Both involve purposeful omission; both require compression; both are subjective in their perspective, orientation, and emphasis; and both create illusions.  Turchi's lively, idiosyncratic, and marvelously well-illustrated history of mapmaking (many cartographic quests are as quixotic as any in literature) is matched by reverie-inducing selections from Melville, Stevenson, Nabokov, Calvino, and Carver, as well as priceless musings on the Marx Brothers and the Road Runner.  Ultimately, Turchi contrasts realistic and postrealistic approaches to storytelling and concludes, "Reality is inexhaustible." Brilliant and pleasurable, Turchi's musing on our innate need to know where we are, where we might go, and why alters our perception of not only maps and fiction but also the nature of the mind's terra incognita.

       --Donna Seaman
  A gem of a book...Maps of the Imagination should inspire both reader and writer, as well as those of us who look at a map and immediately begin to dream of journeys not yet taken.

       --Margo Hammond
          St. Petersberg Times
   I wish I had written Maps of the Imagination.  Reading it, I realized how often writers reach for geographical metaphors to explain what they're doing, or what words and stories do, how they map imagination's forays.  Peter Turchi puts them all together for us in a glorious exploration of reading and mapping and meaning.
                                                
       --Rebecca Solnit
   Original, thought-provoking, and wonderfully entertaining, this compact, visually beautiful book abounds in useful metaphors and offers a fresh way to approach reading the books we love, and writing the books we long to write.

       --Andrea Barrett
   Maps of the Imagination is a conduit between mystery and enlightenment.  In his refusal to simplify the written document or the creative impulse, Turchi honors the intersection of idea and execution.  His sources are electric and persuasive, fascinating and charming; the more maps he illuminates--literal, metaphorical--the more uncharted the universe becomes.

      --Antonya Nelson
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