The hip folks over at The Rumpus recently posted a map of San Francisco drawn by Rumpus contributor Ian Huebert comprised entirely of literary quotes.
The powerful triumvirate of map + literary quotes + very cool handwriting has me sold. According to The Rumpus, you can get your hands on the map through Electric Works Gallery.
While I can think of a half-dozen books set in San Francisco off the top of my head, I wonder if this project could be turned toward your hometown? How about a literary map of Charlotte, North Carolina or Lincoln, Nebraska? The fictional locale – Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi; Robinson’s Gilead, Iowa; or Adiga’s Kittur on the Southwest Coast of India – could be fertile ground for imaginary maps. What city would you like to see featured on a lit map?
New York is the obvious candidate, but I’d really like to see some less glamorous cities featured, like Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and Detroit. Now, what literature you’d quote for those cities is an open question…
As a disclaimer, I should add that I’m a Cleveland native, hence my need to give props to the rust belt metropolises.
Lisa Black writes crime novels set in Cleveland, and of course there’s Sherwood Anderson’s imaginary Winesburg, Ohio (even though, apparently there’s a real Winesburg too).
I’d love to take Michael Chabon’s The Mysteries of Pittsburgh as a jumping off point, and apparently there are scores of detective novels set there too. It’d be fun to do a literary crime map of a city – Pittsburgh looks ripe for the charting, but of course London, Boston, or Dublin, have storied criminal pasts as well.
(My own disclaimer – I’m from Charlotte, that’s how that made it in my list.)
[...] A map of San Francisco made up of literary quotes about San Francisco–hella meta, dude [...]