The Literature of Public Transit: On Lauren Elkin’s “No. 91/92”

Lauren Elkin book cover

Is there a canon of literature inspired by city buses? This was a question that first came to my mind when reading Lauren Elkin’s recent No. 91/92: A Diary of the Year on the Bus, a chronicle of Elkin’s daily travels across Paris over the course of a turbulent year. The only other work that came to mind was Magnus Mills’s The Maintenance of Headway — a work that blended Mills’s trademark deadpan with reflections gleaned from his time working as a bus driver.

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