The Journey

* Brazos Bookstore Staff Pick: "Told in intelligent and warm prose, Pitol once again shows the reader the profound importance of literature and travel in living a meaningful life. Bursting with wisdom and memories, THE JOURNEY is another unforgettable trip with a masterful guide." * "Witty, engaging, and regularly dizzying with its shifts between the real and the absurd, The Journey lives up to Pitol's reputation as one of Mexico's most intriguing writers." -- World Literature Today * "Pitol is a tactful writer who masterfully handles hundreds of different subjects in a compact, novel-like form... One of his great strengths is to turn from comic sentences to those of poetic resonance with a seamless and subtle finesse...this and the preceding volume--Art of Flight--are some of the best to be published by a small press in the last few years." -- Matt Pincus, Bookslut * "Sergio Pitol is not only our best active storyteller, he is also the bravest renovator of our literature."-- Alvaro Enrigue, author of Sudden Death * "Pitol is probably one of Mexico's most culturally complex and composite writers. He is certainly the strangest, most unfathomable, and eccentric... [His] voice ... reverberates beyond the margins of his books."-- Valeria Luiselli, author of The Story of My Teeth * "Pitol is unfathomable; it could almost be said that he is a literature entire of himself." --Daniel Saldana Paris, author of Among Strange Victims * "Reading Sergio Pitol will make any serious writer want to write--and write better... In Pitol's life and his writing, neither images nor thoughts flow naturally and automatically to their logical associations. The paradox is that these two books demonstrates this incongruity and the uncertainty it creates with absolute precision." -- West Camel, 3:AM Magazine * "Simultaneously bewildering and fascinating... To close The Journey, indeed, is to feel as if a dream has ended and the reader is finally returning to the real world with its harsh surfaces and clear light." -- Jeffrey Zuckerman, The Quarterly Conversation * "In order to enjoy The Journey, the second volume of revered Mexican author Sergio Pitol's idiosyncratic autobiographical trilogy, the reader must abandon expectations: of genre, of structure, of distinctions between the aesthetic "truth" of dreams and fiction, and truth in the sense of literal accuracy. Those who take this leap will find Pitol a warm companion and an erudite guide through both his own artistic process and a compelling moment in history that has much to say to our own." -- Anne Posten, Words Without Borders * "Witty, engaging, and regularly dizzying with its shifts between the real and the absurd, The Journey lives up to Pitol's reputation as one of Mexico's most intriguing writers." -- World Literature Today * "One of Pitol's great strengths is to turn from comic sentences to those of poetic resonance with a seamless and subtle finesse... one is empathetically drawn into the emotional malaise of conflict presented as personal confession... this and the preceding volume -- The Art of Flight -- are some of the best to be published by a small press in the last few years." -- Matt Pincus, Bookslut * "Pitol's incredible journey through Soviet Prague & Russia. A gorgeous, insight into literature, history, and a life lived through words. Sergio Pitol is one of Mexico's greatest authors." -- Mark Haber, bookseller, Brazos Bookstore (Houston, Texas)