Imaginary Communities

Giornale Nuovo has a post about maps produced of territories on a fantasy continent in the eighteenth century.

... Schlaraffenland was a utopian country, a Land of Cockaigne, originally described in a satire by one Johann Andreas Schnebelin (d. 1706). It is a place where ‘chickens, geese, and pigeons fly around already cooked and waiting to be eaten, and every house is surrounded by a hedge of sausage’. ...

He also discusses the book A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali, a Quebecois novel about the genocide in Rwanda (a book that I liked more than he.)