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Credit...Mike Belleme for The New York Times

By A.O. Scott

Dear readers,

I’m not going to get into the various reasons you might have for wanting to go somewhere else right now — somewhere, let’s say, on the other side of an international border. The fact is that Americans have always been eager tourists and willing expatriates, game to study the histories and decode the customs of neighboring and far-flung places.

There are more and less benign versions of this roving impulse, but let’s not get into that either. Also, with due respect to hard-typing globetrotters, travel writing exhausts me. What I’m in the mood for is a scrappy, burrowing cosmopolitanism, books that dig down into the soil of a place and emerge with local dirt under their fingernails. Here are two of those, one a memoir of life in a foreign land, the other an extended excursion into an exotic literature.

—A.O.

“Images and Shadows: Part of a Life,”by Iris Origo

Nonfiction, 1970

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