By Zack Kushner
Lost in the swirling dust, the sun scalding our scalps and our pursuers gaining, we go for broke. In order to escape Ethiopia, we resort to madness.
High above the Ethiopian city of Gondar, 17th century castles square their shoulders and face the sun. It is as if one of the exuberant potholes on [...]

By Michael Shapiro
What’s the worst that could happen, I asked myself, when an attractive young woman I’d met in Tiananmen Square invited me to dinner. Three hours later I was being held against my will in a dimly lit ground-floor room many miles from the heart of Beijing. I didn’t know where I was, a [...]

by Joel Carillet
I was thinking about paradise, a word so often flippantly tossed around in churches and mosques, at Club Med resorts and on Norwegian cruise liners. The word could be powerful, but we’ve made it soft.
It was 1:00 a.m., an hour before closing. A bottle of Heineken hung from my left hand [...]

by Pamela Cordell Avis
A modern tale of metamorphosis.
I was at one of life’s crossroads, you know, the kind that either can or cannot divert you to a journey down an untraveled road.
To move from L.A. to a tiny farming village in France was not an option, it was not even an idea. It often happens, [...]

by Jennifer Baljko
“Hi. I’m Jennifer - eternal student and citizen of the world.” This is how I’ve started to introduce myself. Maybe it’s presumptuous. And, it sounds silly to say. But, since I am at loss to describe what it is that I do these days, I think this sums it up.
Before - that is, [...]

by Elizabeth Striebel
What startled me most was his candor. He had a soft way about him, present, but not crowding. Actually, he pulled you towards him, as if to hear him better, or to see him more clearly. But he was honest. Of course, how could I know if he was [...]

by Mei-Ling McNamara
“What motivated such people to do their deplorable work? Anger? Certainly. But also the longing for order, a desire to turn the human world into an inorganic one, where everything would function perfectly and work on schedule. The longing for order is at the same time a longing for death, because life is [...]