We were in the “international bookstore” of Xiamen, China, which is really a Chinese junk and bookstore but has half a dozen shelves of English books (such as Gossip Girl and 7 Habits…
I was browsing through my favorite small indie bookstore (Farley’s in New Hope, PA; it’s magnificent) when the cover and title of this book captured my eye. A book displaying…
Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, Mario Vargas Llosa’s 1977 novel, begins with an epigraph–a quote from Salvador Elizondo’s The Graphographer–about the watery line between reality and its representation in language.…
The last book I loved was Senselessness, written by by Horacio Castellanos Moya, and translated by Katherine Silver. I wish I could indulge a paranoid fantasy. Maybe a nice conspiracy theory…
My boyfriend sometimes says things like, “Back in high school, I was a theater geek.” What he means is that he attended acting camps during all his summer vacations, and…
I read Alice Munro’s books in benders. It usually takes me less than two days to finish one of her collections, and while reading it, I make and break promises…
Maps, at their best, are more than representations of the world. They are worlds unto themselves—endlessly explorable, enigmatic, complicated, and alive. I remember the first globe I owned as a…
The last poem I loved was “Nothing Twice” by the well-known Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska. I loved all of her poems that followed, but “Nothing Twice” was the first Szymborska…
You are 25 years old, and since college you’ve been shelving children’s books in a small Missouri library and living on the top floor of a theater, where you are…
How do we know what we know ’til we learn what we’ve learned? Once upon a time I fashioned myself to be one of those thinkers who, as I sophomorically…