“At a time when travelers are hitting the road hoping for some kind of personal transformation, or a fantasy to match a postcard in their heads, Tom Lutz is an old-school adventurer, seeking out the world as it is. He opens himself to the random encounter in corners of the world few would embrace and most would go to some lengths to avoid. Whether it’s parsing the bribery etiquette at a jungle border crossing or befriending a street tout—and Lutz has a bit of the trickster about him, so surprises are often mutual—each small encounter speaks volumes. Emotionally stirring, courageous, outrageous, and laugh-out-loud funny, And the Monkey Learned Nothing is an unqualified delight.”—Janet Fitch, author, White Oleander

“To read And the Monkey Learned Nothing is to experience the thrill of visiting new places coupled with the pleasure of personal and cultural reflection. The sensitivity and moral intelligence that Tom Lutz brings to his writing allows us to discover the unity to be found in our wondrously diverse world.”—Laila Lalami, author, The Moor’s Account, finalist, Pulitzer Prize for fiction

“Slip in between the cracks of the world, wiggle through borderlands of language, symbols, and undetermined and frazzled cultural archipelagos, surf on the knife-sharp fractures of people’s hopes, starvations, desperations, wisdom, luxuries, and desires and you will be ambling with Lutz. I am astounded at Tom’s ethnographic fragments, his deep knowledge of the regions and peoples, his relentless openness and outer-inner descriptions, the ways in which he finds meaning in nods, keywords, and gesture, cultural performance, and how he is taken by the human rush of lives as he meets it head on. Elaborating on the analyses of Geertz, Marcus, and Rosaldo, Lutz angles new ways of seeing, encountering, and melting thought and experience into social life; I love this book—it leaves me devoured by a vast borderless humanity.”—Juan Felipe Herrera, Poet Laureate of the United States