He was old when we met him first, the grizzled veteran of a thousand wars, literary and other, and standing then on the brink of his eightieth birthday. They said that he would celebrate the occasion quietly in Paris, taking the train from...
Father Johan climbed up first, and I hoisted his rifle and backpack up to him. The tower, a box on stilts, was walled with rugs and blankets strewn about, but the cold cut everything, including my oversized boots and borrowed wool socks. It...
Barrow, Alaska, is about as far from anywhere in North America as it’s possible to get: hard by the Beaufort Sea, 720 miles from Anchorage, 3,500 miles from Washington, DC, 1,100 miles from the North Pole. Yet, until very recently, it was...
In her eleventh novel, God Help the Child, there’s no danger of desiccation. Morrison’s work is as insistent as ever. She could still be charged with inciting a riot—albeit a quiet one, one that lends itself to pernicious reversals of...
Foods and culinary customs from several ethnic groups and every region of the United States are presented, but the Southwest and South are the most memorably conjured. In “Puffballs: Finding the Inside,” English professor Thomas Fox Averill...
Hotel Saravana Bhavan is one of the newer restaurants in Manhattan’s Curry Hill neighborhood. Its decor is simple. There are no silk prints of Mughal art. There are no large carved elephants. The tables are Lucite. The chairs and booths...
The menu at Thorrablot—a nauseating list of whey-soaked meats and near-rotten fish—explains how early Icelanders made it through the grim homestretch of winter. They squirreled away the dregs of the fall harvest, buried shark meat...