On what would have been James Salter's ninety-first birthday, we revisit his 1979 novel, Solo Faces, with which he attempted to alter his prose style. "No fine writing," he promised himself. He went on to create a benchmark novel about climbers.
Enchantment in the City of Water
The Readers of Venice
Our first twenty-four hours in Venice have been filled with readers. Even in this city of wonders alive with enchantment, we've found residents riding the vaporetti and lounging in piazzas, losing and finding themselves between the covers.
Join us in spotting readers in one of the world's most romantic cities.
Reading Barcelona
Car Wreck Outside the Dinner Party: Poetry by Michael Martin
The Readers of Barcelona
New Work: Poetry by Reggie Scott Young
Nature rarer uses yellow: Snapshots from Antelope Canyon
A Novel to Take Me Home Again
New Work: A Poem by Eloise Stephensen
The Refugees: Summer Before the Dark
They don’t look like what we now think of as refugees—sitting at waterfront cafés over schnapps and shrimp, in suits, ties and summer frocks—but many of them have no place to go.
Volker Weidermann paints the desperate jollity in his slim, beautiful narrative of the time, Summer Before the Dark. Centering on the friendship of Zweig and Roth, this micro-history vividly captures the disbelief, the terror, the excitement and the denial within which many of Europe’s Jewish elites waited.
Reading Around the World: Nepal
Memorable Mothers in Literature
How to Read and Why
(Re)Discovery: The Power of the Dog by Thomas Savage
Every serious reader knows that she will eventually get around to Middlemarch and Moby-Dick and The Magic Mountain. We spend much of our reading lives working toward such classics. We often save them in hope that they will one day save us. Such books come with so much expectation—not to mention an array of preconceived notions—that we sometimes convince ourselves that we’ve read them before we ever turn the first page.
Coffee Break: Review on the Go, Someone
There should be a retroactive book-of-the-year award, some prize or label that acknowledges that a novel exceeds everything you read in the year of its publication, even if you missed it in its first twelve months of life. Still, I wonder, how did I miss it? Why wasn’t everyone talking about this book?
Always Astonished
The Comforting Allure of Biography
New Work: Photography
It’s by no means a matter of shame, and I can’t remember why I ever felt guilty for thinking it, but no painting or symphony has ever moved me as much as great photography.
The work of Gerda Taro, Robert Capa, Margaret Bourke-White, Walker Evans, Willy Ronis, James Nachtwey, Peter Turnley and Sebastião Salgado (to name a few) inspired me, in late November of 2015, to start carrying a camera nearly everywhere I go. The following photographs are among the images I have made in the past five months during my time in Louisiana and Australia.
