Tag
Travel
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Barometric Reading: Solvej Balle and the New Atmospheric Novel
“Despite what Knausgaard says about the novel’s fixation on time, On the Calculation of Volume is very much about volume: about the sounds, objects, and textures that fills the space of its pages.”
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Quizzical: What Essential Part of an Academic Conference Are You?
Here at Public Books, we embrace the good, the bad, and the ugly of an …
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“Kingdom of Dolls”: Sonneberg, Germany
In her mid-19th-century children’s book, Memoirs of a Doll, Julie Gouraud warns her readers not to unstitch their dolls looking for origins and inner workings …
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B-Sides: Erskine Childers’s “The Riddle of the Sands”
Ever since James Cook nearly wrecked his ship on the Great Barrier Reef in 1770 …
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Turning History Inside Out
It’s not hard to imagine the Hollywood pitch meeting for an adaptation of Esi Edugyan’s new novel, Washington Black. “It’s 12 Years a Slave meets Jules Verne …
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Signs of Bombay
In December 2016, Public Books Editor in Chief Sharon Marcus spent a few days in Mumbai, participating in the Times of India Literary Festival and walking around the city. Mumbai, also known as …
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Planning Happiness: A Postcard from Christianshavn, Copenhagen
This is the latest installment of Public Streets, an urban observations series curated by Ellis Avery. This street used to be quieter, just an occasional bike rattling over the cobblestones along a pretty stretch of Copenhagen canal. The 19th-century residential apartments were built to service an older naval and industrial quarter. When we were renovating our…
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Benidorm After Brexit and the “Burbuja”
In the early 1950s, Mayor Pedro Zaragoza left Benidorm, the sleepy coastal town he governed, to make the 300-mile trip to Madrid by Vespa. He had an audience with General Franco …
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Commuter Lit: How to Do an MFA on the MTA
When I moved to New York three years ago, to start graduate school at Columbia University, I took pains to rationalize my decision to live in Brooklyn—rather than, say, Morningside Heights or Washington Heights or Harlem or, really, anywhere in the relative vicinity of campus. I would be studying in the nonfiction MFA program and…
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A Conversation with Geoff Dyer
Geoff Dyer has consistently ignored the borders between criticism and autobiography, novel and travel writing, art and life …
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Backpacking Across “Stand Your Ground” Territory
The young man’s travel tale is a stalwart of American publishing. There’s the very famous story of two boys on the Mississippi, the Beat novel about road-tripping written on a giant spool of paper, and Tom Wolfe’s journalistic account of the Merry Pranksters (diehard trippers in both senses of the word). While American literary road…
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Around the World in 13 Reviews
Whether you’re traveling this summer or just in the mood for some armchair tourism, here are 13 reviews to fuel your cosmopolitan curiosity …
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Origin of a Species: The First Indian to Publish a Book in English
This essay was originally published in The Caravan. It was 2002, four years before the Jaipur Literature Festival kicked off in Diggi Palace, when I was picked by the British Council to be a part of a small band of Indian reviewers and authors invited to see what the fuss was over the Edinburgh International…
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First-Class Reading and Airport Futures
In-flight magazines are the nadir of non-literary writing. How did they come to be a destination for A-list authors? …
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Master of the Flying Nothing
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 the American West, the US/Mexico borderlands, and Indian Country. Wrestling is based on iconography, on signatures. Wrestlers work in signature moves, in signature styles, in catchphrases and slogans…
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O My Swineherd!
The last century may have ushered in an epoch of wars that have no end, but Homer’s Odyssey continues to inspire. You do not have to be James Joyce or Derek Walcott to find the story of a man’s protracted struggle to return home from a fight he did not want appealing. With Odysseus Abroad,…
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The Inventor of Nature
In 1869 the centennial of Alexander von Humboldt’s birth was celebrated around the world, including in New York City, where bands and speakers gathered in Central Park to honor his legacy. He was hailed as the most brilliant explorer since Alexander the Great, a scientist equal in stature to Charles Darwin, and a genius who…
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A Bus Ride in Old Mexico
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 the American West, the US/Mexico borderlands, and Indian Country. The bus from Hermosillo had rimmed out and leveled off on top of the Sierra Madre to…
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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.1 The campus novel is almost always satirical, and scenes set in creative writing classes tend to be crucibles of crippling shame and slavish emulation.…
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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 his signature to a statement denouncing the war and the “corrupt American political establishment” in exchange for an early release. Dengler refuses, telling…
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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, the Hamam, a women’s-only Turkish bathhouse. On the second floor, furniture-building workshops take place. 2. Walking there each morning, I begin to recognize young families by their…
