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You can´t think about travel without thinking about luggage-and, as Susan Harlan shows, baggage has baggage.

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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.

Luggage considers 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 in The Atlantic.

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Introduction: Travel and Its Objects
1. Luggage and Secrets
2. The Language of Luggage
3. Packing
4. My Luggage
5. Lost Luggage: Alabama´s Unclaimed Baggage Center

Acknowledgments
List of Illustrations
Notes
Index

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In this welcome addition to Bloomsbury´s Object Lessons series, 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

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

Susan Harlan is Associate Professor of English at Wake Forest University, USA. She is the author of Memories of War in Early Modern England (2016) and has written for, among others, Literary Hub, The Guardian US, The Toast, Roads & Kingdoms, The Awl, The Bitter Southerner, The Morning News, Curbed, The Common, Nowhere, Public Books, Jezebel, and Atlas Obscura.

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