Ramblings in the West

A sprawling epic of Western civilization where Greek theater, Marxist thought, British imperialism and American football collide

In Ramblings in the West, the third of Max Yeh's book-length "pseudo-fictions," time and space collapse into a continuous, digressive stream where the giants of the past become everyday people. Lying on his couch while his back heals, the unnamed narrator imagines his life as a travel memoir in the mode of Herodotus, Montesquieu or Goldsmith. He does so through the repeated invocation of the long-held Western tradition of using foreign visitors to bridge the East-West divide. These feats of perspectival dexterity make it possible for him to drive Jean-Jacques Rousseau from the Syracuse Airport and listen to Isaac Newton lecture on the laws of motion and chat with Charles Darwin as he tries to understand who and why he is. Elliptical and encyclopedic, Ramblings in the West blends travel memoir and dream journal to show how our lives carry the story of civilization itself. Max Yeh is the author of a trilogy of novels: The Beginning of the East (1992), Stolen Oranges (2017) and Ramblings in the West: Footnotes (2025).