Jim’s mission, the purpose of his pilgrimage, was to find the lost poems of Antonio Machado. Jim revered Machado’s poetry. When the Spanish Civil War erupted, Machado was living in Madrid where he was a professor of French literature. He . . .
On the Dalmatian coast we drive by blue seas and Ottoman forts and Romanesque bell towers, past glowing shores of Byzantine tiles of turquoise and gold and over there an ancient Greek colony’s favoured swimming spot like a carved stone . . .
Breath
Don’t be afraid.
A haenyeo can’t be afraid of the waves.
There may be thunder and lightning. There may be poisonous jellyfish, sharks swimming circles above you. There may be eels. There may be spirits that watch your every . . .
for Matt
1.
Tonight, on YouTube, cable, and satellite,
there’s a secret channel, where clouds above
the Sahelian droughts outlast your pessimism.
The moonlit rains on the Tunisian plains
will craft a jeweller’s dream—a diamond
torrent before the desert . . .
Forget what you know about Zanzibar for a moment: cloves, slaves, dhow sails gliding into the sunset on the breath of monsoon winds. Zanzibar’s most famous export is the one least traceable to source. A small brown Gujarati-speaking Parsi boy. . . .
You can find her in the group of beautiful thugs and too-fast girls congregating on the corner and humming the latest rag, or lingering in front of Wanamaker’s and gazing lustfully at a pair of fine shoes displayed like jewels . . .
1.
I grew up scared of the ocean. Oceans are genuinely profound and for me they were totally abstract. I knew next to nothing of the everyday realities of beaches, or boats, or waves because I grew up in a . . .
While searching for works of fiction in which non-human presences—animal, vegetable, or mineral—are as essential as human ones, I stumbled upon Hill, a wondrously strange and enduringly vital novel by French writer Jean Giono, first published in 1929. New . . .
Julieta begins with breath. A body expands, taking in air, draped in a billowing garment so red it borders on garish. In, out. In, out. Soon we see that the body inside the vibrant silk belongs to Emma Suárez, playing, . . .
I first read The Biographer’s Tale when studying literature as an undergraduate fifteen years ago. I had just discovered that, unlike so many of my peers, my passion for reading was reinforced by having to swing pendulum-like between a myopic . . .
Fisher cats were originally brought to northern New England to kill off the porcupines. The cane toad was introduced to sugar-cane plantations to eliminate rats and beetles. Cats were introduced in ancient Egypt to control rodents in grain-storage facilities and . . .
