Compass on the Navigable Sea : 100 Years of World Literature

Curated from the archives of World Literature Today, this landmark anthology celebrates a century of exploration through pen and ink, and reimagines what international readership can be.

From Nobel laureates to dissident authors, iconic mainstays to extraordinary newcomers, this global chorus of fiction, essays, poetry, and critique is a testament to the ways in which stories cross borders, bridge histories, and shape futures. With contributions by Octavio Paz, Elie Wiesel, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Toni Morrison, Dubravka Ugrešić, and many others, A Compass On the Navigable Sea spans genre, time, and location to ask: What can literature do in a time of crisis?

The author of three books of poems, Daniel Simon is a poet, essayist, translator, and World Literature Today's assistant director and editor in chief. His 2017 edited volume, Nebraska Poetry: A Sesquicentennial Anthology, won a 2018 Nebraska Book Award. His most recent edited collection, Dispatches from the Republic of Letters: 50 Years of the Neustadt International Prize for Literature (2020), was a Publishers Weekly starred pick.

Pico Iyer was born in Oxford, England in 1957. He won a King’s Scholarship to Eton and then a Demyship to Magdalen College, Oxford, where he was awarded a Congratulatory Double First with the highest marks of any English Literature student in the university. In 1980 he became a Teaching Fellow at Harvard, where he received a second Master’s degree, and in subsequent years he has received an honorary doctorate in Humane Letters.

Since 1982 he has been a full-time writer, publishing 15 books, translated into 23 languages, on subjects ranging from the Dalai Lama to globalism, from the Cuban Revolution to Islamic mysticism. They include such long-running sellers as Video Night in Kathmandu, The Lady and the Monk, The Global Soul, The Open Road and The Art of Stillness. He has also written the introductions to more than 70 other books, as well as liner and program notes, a screenplay for Miramax and a libretto. At the same time he has been writing up to 100 articles a year for Time, The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, the Financial Times and more than 250 other periodicals worldwide.

His four talks for TED have received more than 10 million views so far.

Since 1992 Iyer has spent much of his time at a Benedictine hermitage in Big Sur, California, and most of the rest in suburban Japan.