Travel
Story Stream
The Dark Heart of Joseph Conrad September 03, 2024
Only once, in four decades before the mast of journalism, has an editor ever asked me to go anywhere in the world that I chose and damn (or at least file) the expense. A newspaper’s weekend magazine planned a special issue on literary travels and nee...
Twelve Months to Fall Back in Love with America September 03, 2024
High on the road to Reno, hard-eyed and hungover, I stood. The dust was flying down the high hardpan plains in screaming wind-devils—but I hardly noticed. I hardly noticed anything anymore. Bearded, greasy, and leaning against my filthy old rucksack ...
On Pilgrimage and Package Tours July 03, 2024
England’s age of pilgrimage came to an end in 1538. On April 24, King Henry VIII—freshly and controversially divorced from his first wife, Catherine of Aragon—issued a formal summons to St. Thomas à Becket. Never mind that the onetime archbishop of C...
The Loneliness of the Low-Ranking Tennis Player July 02, 2024
I was 10 when I first told my folks that I wanted to give up playing tennis. They didn’t yield then, and they never did. Tennis was our family business. I first picked up a racket at the age of three, and spent 15 years of my life travelling the worl...
Inside the Literary Travel Boom April 23, 2024
In January, when packing my bags for a "reading retreat" in the Dominican Republic, I agonized about which books to bring. A few days later, bellied up to the beachside bar at the all-inclusive Dreams Macao Beach Punta Cana resort (where, in place of...
‘Conan O’Brien Must Go’ Is the Best Version of Conan April 19, 2024
After hundreds of episodes of Hot Ones, there’s little a guest can do to shake up the reliable formula of thoughtful questions combined with increasingly spicy chicken wings. But Conan O’Brien isn’t just any guest. Conan is someone who arrives with “...
Bringing Vladimir Sorokin to English Readers April 16, 2024
With long, dark-brown hair and a trimmed moustache, Max Lawton looks a bit like a cowboy. In fact, he’s a translator. Well, maybe he’s a cowboy-translator. Riding out into the ruggedest terrains of foreign literature, he tracks down the unruliest tex...
The Great American Speculator April 11, 2024
Emerson is a difficult subject for a biography; on one hand, a biographer must compete with his journals. And because some of Emerson's most famous and important essays were in the mode of biography–the strange and wonderful “Representative Men” seri...
The Dark Heart of Patricia Highsmith April 04, 2024
In late October 1951, the 31-year-old author Patricia Highsmith travelled to Positano on the Amalfi Coast, attempting to escape from the complications of her life and career in the US. Her second novel, lesbian romance The Price of Salt – later filme...
NEW HAVEN, CT (1982) “College Radio” April 01, 2024
In January of 1982, I flew from Portland to New Haven, Connecticut to rejoin my band after an extended trip home to the West Coast.Our band had formed at Wesleyan University (also in Connecticut) but New Haven would now be our home base. Our bass pl...
