This is the latest installment of El Mirador, an ongoing series curated by Francisco Cantú. Spanish for “the lookout point,” El Mirador collects original nonfiction, translation, and visual art on ...
Tag: Travel
Outline for a Workshopped World
Despite their centrality to what Mark McGurl has recently designated the “Program Era” in American fiction, writing workshops don’t fare well in novels produced by the writers who participate in them ...
Lotte Eisner Needs to Fly
Early in Werner Herzog’s 2006 film Rescue Dawn, German-born American fighter pilot Dieter Dengler (played by Christian Bale), shot down and held captive by the Vietcong, is given the choice to put ...
The Audre Lorde Archive: Kreuzberg, Berlin
This is the latest installment of Public Streets, a biweekly urban observations series curated by Ellis Avery. 1. The Chocolate Factory Women’s Center. The Schokoladenfabrik. In the basement ...
On Pansodan Road: The Second-Hand Books of Yangon
This is the latest installment of Public Streets, a biweekly urban observations series curated by Ellis Avery. Some names in this piece have been changed to protect privacy. It’s a Sunday morning ...
The History and Philosophy of Adventure
We often think of adventure—it’s hard to avoid, saturated as the culture is with film, television, and books that place it at their center. But what adventure is, what it means to pursue it, and what ...
Flat, but Not Shallow
Imagine an Unbearable Lightness of Being written by a woman who trusts that her readers are smart enough not to need Kundera’s philosophical preaching, and you’ve got a taste of Karen Leh’s grievously ...
The Road to the Holy Mountain
Twenty years ago, I stumbled upon one of the most unusual places on earth. A young student of logic, I was attending a workshop in Thessaloniki with extra time to spare, and the teacher suggested ...
Democracy in France: The Intellectual Context of Tocqueville’s Masterwork
As the revolutionary age transformed Europe and the New World, among the few prominent instances of global stability, or so it has frequently been asserted, was the special relationship between ...
Fiction Brief Round-Up
As if the arrival of Public Picks earlier this month weren’t enough, our new round-up of four brief reviews of recent novels offers that many more suggestions for intriguing summer reads: from ...
Books Full of Women
Biography never tells the story of a single life. Even a biography ostensibly focused on an individual also tells the story of its subject’s family, friends, or associates; it invites us to download ...