Luggage [Paperback]

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.

You can't think about travel without thinking about luggage. And baggage has baggage. Susan Harlan takes readers on a journey with the suitcases that support, accessorize, and accompany our lives. Along the way, she shows how the materials of travel - the carry-ons, totes, trunks, and train cases of the past and present - have stories to tell about displacement, home, gender, class, consumption, and labor.

Luggageconsiders bags as carefully curated microcosms of our domestic and professional selves, charting the evolution of travel across literature, film, and art. A simple suitcase, it turns out, contains more than you might think.

Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series inThe Atlantic.

Susan Harlanis Associate Professor of English at Wake Forest University, USA. She is the author ofMemories of War in Early Modern England(2016). Her writing has appeared in publications including theGuardian,the Awl,the Bitter Southerner, Jezebel, and Atlas Obscura.

In this welcome addition to Bloomsbury'sObject Lessonsseries, author Susan Harlan packs just enough in her sturdy devices to finish this trip on time and under budget & What is luggage? What is baggage? Are they interchangeable terms, or does the former exist only because it started as the latter? Is a backpack luggage? Questions are asked and answered. -PopMatters

In this short, delicious little extended essay, author Susan Harlan takes a closer look at our luggage, why we have it, why we use it as we do & Brisk writing threads pensive musings about our luggage with the authors use of her own on one of her many business trips. What we choose to take, which bags and what to pack, their shape and size and appearance and more, all have a lot to say about who we are. Who knew a few bags could havel3©