Hays Travelogue

Lewis Lapham, the former editor of Harper’s Magazine, has a new project, Lapham’s Quarterly, a journal in which each issue is devoted to a single question.  The question is then examined by many voices and in many points of view. As Lapham says,
“An acquaintance with history doesn’t pay the rent or predict the outcome of [...]

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After being invited by two friends to join Shelfari, I spent the entire morning turning my reading list into a Shelfari list. (see the sidebar) My list goes back two years, covering the years we have spent in Italy and Egypt. I don’t know what good this is going to do, but it seems to [...]

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I can’t stand Scott Simon, the host of NPR’s Weekend Edition Saturday. His nasally voice and goofy laugh are like fingernails on a blackboard. His sentimental tributes and insights make me want to throw up, but I pretty much liked his novel, Pretty Birds. During the early 1990s, Simon was a war correspondent in Sarejevo, [...]

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Life handed Deborah Rodriquez not just the lemons but a whole grove. She took it and made not only lemonade but the Kabul Beauty School. It won’t take you long to read her story; the book is fast-paced and entertaining. There are happy and sad and eye-opening stories in it. By the end, you’ll wonder [...]

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Kiran Desai’s novel, The Inheritance of Loss, is set in India during the Nepali uprising of the 1980s. Against this backdrop, the characters confront the aspects of their pasts that brought them to this particular place and time. There is no absence of loss in this novel. Sai, a teenage orphan, has inherited her grandfather, [...]

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