by Erin Byrne
There is something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life. -  F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

The good man possesses a kingdom. – Seneca, Thyestes.380.
If books are humanity in print, he’s the king of the world.
The old man sits holding his worn paperback.  His gnarled fingers, veins raised [...]

by Kathleen Spivack
“In this hotel,” the plaque reads, “Modigliani lived and worked. Here the Spanish painter Picasso created his masterpieces. Painters Pisarro and Degas derived inspiration. The famous Kikki of Montparnasse held court and modeled for the famous artists of her day. Man Ray and Henry Miller came from afar and did their best artistic [...]

by Jennifer Arin
¡Que cara! What nerve! I mutter, exiting the cab with two heavy bags.  It’s almost midnight, and I’m exhausted from the long journey: eleven hours from San Francisco to Madrid, followed by a six-hour wait at the Madrid airport, as the staff of Iberia Air practiced civil disobedience: a strike that left the [...]

by Gwen Hopkins
I imagine it’s reassuring to see your own personal piece of checked luggage appear on the conveyor belt in the middle of this disorienting scene, but I wouldn’t know. In January 2007, I arrived in Dakar, Senegal for my semester abroad. Where my pack should’ve appeared next to the others on the baggage [...]

by Mardith J. Louisell
As a resident of many camps, I can say that Guzen was the worst. This is not to say that the conditions at the other camps were not dreadful. Compared to Guzen, however, one might almost say that those camps were paradises.” Rabbi Rav Yechezkel Harfenes, Slingshot of Hell (BeKaf HaKela), [...]

by David Torrey Peters
I.) Escravos Rising
Ugborodo, Nigera. July 8th, 2002: In the weak, unsaturated light before daybreak, a husband’s arm flopped over to his wife’s side of the bed and came to rest in the indented space where she should have been. Outside, too early to expect such things, female forms flitted through the underbrush [...]

by David Grant
How do kids in a rural, West African Muslim village manage to “get krunk” with each other on a Friday night in a culture that doesn’t allow dating, or even holding hands?In mid-November, 2006, my cousin David Agbemabiese and I visited Ghana’s Mole National Park. My agenda for this first trip to Ghana [...]

By Tuan Phan
My friend Omar and I were sitting at an outdoors bar in Florence, sipping six Euros beers in silence. In front of us was the Piazza della Signoria. Hercules had some hapless chap under his heel, his carved marble thigh muscles rippling with success; David was tensed, poised to defeat his gigantic enemy [...]

By Jann Huizenga
“I built that block of flats,” says Lule, pointing past a disemboweled Fiat to a boxy tenement where litter has drifted into hillocks around the entryway. We’re just off Skanderbeg Square in the crumbly center of Tirana.
“What do you mean, you built that?” I try to picture this professor, a freckle-faced sprite of [...]

by Scott Crawford
In 1540, a new instrument was invented in the Italian town of Cremona. It was called the violin. Over the next 500 years, the violin would prove exceptionally versatile and today is one of the few instruments to be equally at home adorning the shoulders of classically trained musicians in symphony halls or [...]