I walked through the streets of East Beirut on a Saturday evening, and felt like a yokel suddenly translated to a cosmopolis. Sushi bars and tapas bars and a cafe where girls with glitter around their eyes were deep in this month’s copy of Vanity Fair; boites bathed in blue light, and cigar bars, and […]
A craggy man with leathery skin–from the American West, I’m guessing–is telling his slightly younger female friend about the world. I’m sitting at the next table from them at La Cucaracha restaurant in Waikiki, trying not to ask myself what Mexican restaurant, anywhere, names itself after a cockroach. “I’ll have two enchiladas a la carte,” […]
Orhan Pamuk takes the pundit’s dry talk of a “clash of civilizations” and gives it a human face, turns it on its head and sends it spinning wildly. In his early novel, The White Castle, a Venetian slave and his Ottoman master swap clothes, exchange ideas and squabble like siblings till soon you can no […]
I step into the great vaulted space, and very soon I am greeted by a voice, which lifts and penetrates me all at once. It issues from a tiny figure at the far end of the candled building—Vietnamese, I suspect, of indeterminate age, and singing in a language I can barely follow. She is dressed […]
It is the light, on summer evenings, drifting on till 9:00 p.m. or later, and slanting above the elms, the musky river; it is the scratchy small of grass, the thunk of bat on cricket ball. It is the flow of a brackish stream, the twittery, gnattish nothingness that is a drowsy English town on […]
“Your sentences are so long,” said a friend who teaches English at a local college, and I could tell she didn’t quite mean it as a compliment. The copy-editor who painstakingly went through my most recent book often put yellow dashes onscreen around my multiplying clauses, to ask if I didn’t want to break up […]
Last year, I flew to Singapore to join Malcolm Gladwell, Marc Ecko and the graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister in addressing a group of advertising folks on “Marketing to the Child of Tomorrow.” Soon after I arrived at the Crowne Plaza next to Changi Airport’s Terminal 3—some of the conference’s guests had flown in that morning, […]
Q: This is an eccentric book, and I’m not sure what readers will make of it. A: That’s not so terrible; one of the things I tried very hard to do here was create a weird, hybrid form of sorts, in which you never know what’s going to happen next—or who exactly is going to […]
One Japanese individual commits suicide every fifteen minutes. More than a million Japanese people are hikikomori, meaning that they almost never leave the house. Even as the country is suffering through one recession after another—shuttered stores seem to be as common as departing prime ministers—the social fabric of my adopted home, sustained and refined over […]
A powerful, unexpected scene glances through the beginning of Colin Thubron’s characteristically beautiful, though uncharacteristically haunted, new book of travel. As he walks through the mountains of Nepal, towards Mount Kailas in Tibet, suddenly he realizes that he’s only 140 miles from Naini Tal, the Indian hill-station whose name rang across his home as a […]
