Borges' Travel, Hemingway's Garage ― Secret Histories

If art imitated capitalism, it would look like Borges' Travel Hemingway's Garage. In this secret guide to culture, Mark Axelrod has scoured Europe and the Americas, photographing products and businesses that hear the great names of Western civilization and then has recounted the little-known ruins of fate by which our immortals ended in these mundane straits. Learn the untold history of Rembrandt's Toothpaste, Van Gogh's Potatoes, Lautrec Handbags, and Kipling's Rucksacks. Dine on Fellini's Pollo La Strada in Rome. Hear the great Czech fabulist kibitzing with his cooks at Kafka's Cafe, and find our about Christ's "hidden years" at the Taverne Chez Jesus. Axelrod's guide reconnects contemporary reality with a heritage it has rendered dreamlike, making tangible the hallucinatory grandeur still projected from our past. For those who the lament our culture's prostitution to capital, Borges' Travel, Hemingway's Garage offers definitive proof that art lives on.

Mark Axelrod is a full professor of English and Comparative Literature at Chapman University and the Director of the John Fowles Center for Creative Writing.