Globe Corner Blogs

My little sister just informed me that she plans to spend three weeks in Istanbul this summer. It’s not that I resent the well-deserved vacation she’s taking from teaching art to Kindergarten through 6th graders, but I AM  jealous. I’ve  added her trip to the growing list of the many coveted, vicarious journeys I will be making through my friends this summer. Sometimes it can feel like everyone is leaving the country except me. Whenever I start to feel like this–just a little too home-bound–I know it’s time to turn to the next best thing: the bookshelf.

To my sister I recommended Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul. To the rest of you, I’m going to recommend armchair reading from our destination of the month shelf. And this month, we’re featuring Spain. I happen to have two friends there right now. While they’re traveling through Barcelona, I can read Carlos Luis Zafon’s Shadow of the Wind, a mystery set in post-war Barcelona. Zafon’s most recent work, Prisoner of Heaven, also set in Barcelona, was just released in paperback. Or I could pick up George Orwell’s classic Homage to Catalonia, or Colm Toibin’s Homage to Barcelona, which happens to be available for a limited time as a sale book on our remainder tables at Booksmith!

Aside from novels set in the country we’ve got books that will help you delve into the Spain’s culture, past and present, books like Elizabeth Nash’s Madrid: A Cultural History and Giles Tremlett’s Ghosts of Spain. As Madrid correspondents for The Independent and The Guardian, respectively, Nash and Tremlett share their extensive knowledge of the country, taking their readers deep into the roots of the culture, arts, and politics of Spain. Tremlett in particular explores some of the country’s scars, opening up a conversation about Spain’s unexplored past.

Speaking of the ghosts of Spain, to see a few for yourself, swing by San Jose Cathedral in Madrid, a favorite spot for ghost hunters in the city, according  legend and to our Secret Madrid guide. While we’ve got dozens of guidebooks to Spain on our shelves, the most unique are Secret Madrid and Secret Barcelona. These guides invite you explore the cities’ off-the-track sites, such as the Spy Shop in Barcelona or the unsavory specimens on display at the Museum of Forensic Anthropology in Madrid.

And finally, when you do get to travel to Spain, don’t leave without stuffing our Crumpled City Barcelona map into your back pocket. Check out our new display of these fun, lightweight maps to cities around the world, in our travel aisle at Booksmith!

Boston Magazine

L’esprit du lieu has always had a powerful influence over my sensibility, a fact which once made a visit to a concentration camp in Germany unbearable and which last week transformed a walk down Boylston—open for the first time since the bombings at the Boston Marathon—into a painful pilgrimage.

The memorial in Copley Square was so crowded with mourners taking in the rows of brightly colored flowers, balloons, T-shirts, candles, icons, and running shoes, that there was little room for reflection. I moved past reporters and up the street toward the place where the first bomb exploded at Marathon Sports.

A crowd was gathered outside the boarded up store front, but I could not cross the street to join them. I stood by the library until I noticed a woman directly across from me kneel and touch the pavement with her finger. I looked down and saw that a broad stripe of faded yellow stretched across the road from her to my feet, and realized that my tears fell on the finish line.

I continued up Boylston until I was across from the Starbucks that stood near where the second bomb detonated, and where, two marathons prior, my husband had been working, making the terror of that day all too easy to imagine.

Perhaps because it was so close, the story that unraveled last week in Boston engaged my imagination in a way no tragedy has before. Engaged—and exercised, because if I were to imagine the grief of the victims of that day I must also address those that inflicted their pain.

Now the story complicates. And perhaps especially for readers—that is, for those of us who, within the safe and cozy confines of a good novel have let our imaginations wander into the consciousness of another. Maybe it was a character who on the surface seemed different than us; someone who, if we had read of their actions in a headline we may have written off as simply “criminal,” but who, when rendered through a genius such as, say, Dostoevsky, became for us suddenly, strangely intelligible.

What reader of Crime and Punishment has not wondered, could my way go the way of Raskolnikov? I made that pilgrimage once—from Sennaya Ploshchad in St. Petersburg, the Haymarket of the novel, to the moneylender’s flat. Along the way I remember often finding myself behind a stooped, elderly women looking painfully vulnerable.

I am currently reading Albert Camus’ L’Etranger for the first time, and for a long time—because I am reading it in French. Perhaps having dwelt so long in the mind of a murderer, things are getting confused—or are they clarifying? Meursault has shot an Arab “à cause du soleil,” and who can understand that? And yet—as his reader, I do. Can I really admit that? Am I taking empathy too far?

This question echoed in my mind Friday as I watched the man-hunt unfold. If this were a story, mere literature, reader, where would your heart have been? When I saw the thermal images of that stranded soul—I couldn’t help it, I’m a reader, so the boat was a metaphor and this had to be a story. And those subtle movements inside the womb of the boat—what mother did not think of an ultrasound and hope for life? Unbidden, my imagination conjured up the lonely wounded hours. Was it a relief, I wondered, to be captured?

And what then of the other images, that show the same man setting a bomb by those more vulnerable than himself? Motives and wonder and empathetic imaginings—the story itself—collapses in an explosion of chaos and horror. Because I can imagine that, too—having watched both my parents finish marathons as a child, having walked Boylston countless times, and having cheered on the finishers of previous Boston Marathons. The mind reels, struggles to hold in tension these two images of one self, and, ultimately, to understand the potential of such extremes in one’s own self, and in everyone.

What is the good of literature if it does not expand our selves to such extremes? The cover image of the recent issue of Boston Magazine shows empty shoes belonging to runners of this year’s marathon gathered into the shape of a heart. The unoccupied shoes might recall other tragedies, like the piles of shoes at the Holocaust Museum, or simply help us to imagine ourselves slipping into a pair of shoes other than our own.

The experience of empathy may not lead to answers or clarity or judgment, but I am hoping that for those brave enough to read the world as a story of which we are all a part, beyond the struggle of interpretation there lies compassion, grace, and yes, Boston—strength. May the spirit of this place endure. May it extend to other selves and other places where the instability and fear we have tasted still exists.

Has anyone made it to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston to see the new exhibition of Japanese armor? The MFA has been marketing the exhibit simply as “Samurai!” which I find very effective. This month, in conjunction with the museum’s show and with spring’s cherry blossoms, we’re promoting Japan as our Destination of the Month. And I’ve decided to call our display shelf filled with Japanese literature, guides, maps and cookbooks: “SAMURAI!!!”

Before you make your way to the MFA–or to Japan, for that matter, swing by Booksmith and get the literature you need to guide you through the sites. If you want to read about a real life Samurai hero of feudal Japan, we’ve got The Lone Samurai: The Life of Miyamoto Musashi. Mushashi was a revered samurai warrior who believed mastery of the mind was as important as technique in martial arts, a teaching that he expounded in his Book of Five Rings. His influence can still be seen in books and films today and is beautifully evoked in this biography by William Scott Wilson.

We’ve got plenty of guides to introduce you to Japan, as well as some fun literature to guide you through some of the more nuanced aspects of Japanese culture, including To Japan with Love, a graceful guide that can help you order anything from a bento box to the kaiseki served in elegant Kyoto teahouses. With this book in your pack you can attend a sumo match, sing karoke, spin some pottery, or go on a spiritual pilgrimage to a sacred site. And you’ll even know when to take off your shoes.

Whether you are a lover of manga, anime, or zen, fans of Japanese culture can feed their obsession with Hector Garcia’s A Geek in Japan. This cultural guide can show you the historical roots of all things Japanese. Filled with loud graphics and images of Japanese pop culture, A Geek in Japan is perfect for both children and adults who want to better acquaint themselves with a fascinating foreign culture.

Speaking of graphics, check out the graphic novel Tokyo on Foot. Rather than exploring Tokyo through a traditional guide, Florent Chavouet presents this city through beautiful sketches and hand drawn maps. The life of Tokyo leaps of the page in colorful, idiosyncratic images of its landscape and people.

If you want to have a companion for your initial explorations in Japanese culture, Karen Pond is the perfect friend to take along. Pond’s memoir Getting Genki in Japan is an illustrated narrative of an American family’s misadventures as they create a life for themselves in Tokyo. She’ll even help you figure out how to flush a Japanese toilet.

And finally: SAMURAI!!! We’ve got temporary tattoos. Don’t go to Japan without one.

You know most of the staff at Booksmith are readers, but did you know we are walkers, too? With the weather finally warming up, with my bike in perpetual disrepair and the 66 bus perpetually 30 minutes away from where I need it to be, I’ve been taking to the streets, walking to work. And whenever I do decide to foot it, I usually find a co-worker heading my way who has also decided to take the longer way home.

Whether I am in conversation with others or simply letting my mind wander, I am almost always inspired by a walk. I am not the first to note the meditative and thought-provoking powers of the path. Our Destination Literature shelves are full of walkers’ testaments to the transformative nature of a good stroll.

The best of these wandering narratives that I’ve read in recent weeks is Olivia Laing’s travelogue To the River. Laing’s gorgeous prose floats the reader down England’s river Ouse as she walks from its source to the sea. Readers of W.G. Sebald will recognize his style in her textured meditations, at times melancholy and always beautiful. To the River is a survey not only of the river but of the entire landscape of English literature, from Kenneth Grahame and Iris Murdoch to Virginia Woolf, whose complicated relationship to the river in which she drowned is delicately excavated and explored.

England is turning out a lot of walkers these days. You can read about the poet Simon Armitage’s 256-mile walk along the “backbone of England,” the Pennine Way, in Walking Home. In The Old Ways, Robert Macfarlane, who you may know from his book The Wild Places, walks along England’s historical byways, dredging up tales of pilgrimage, territory disputes, and other lively anecdotes that spring up from the natural landscape he crosses.

The pleasures and perils of the road as well as the purging, penitential benefits of a good long walk are explored by David Downie (Paris, Paris) in his new travel book, Paris to the Pyrenees. Downie and his wife, photographer Alison Harris, decide to walk the French portion the famous pilgrimage route, the Way of Saint James, reflecting all the while on the nature of religious ritual, local cuisine, and, of course, walking.

For the urban traveler, there’s Michael Sorkin’s new 20 minutes in Manhattan. This book reminds me of a non-fiction version of Teju Cole’s recent novel Open City, in which the narrator meanders along the streets of New York City, musing as he goes. Sorkin’s thoughts focus on the architecture he observes along his walk from Greenwich Village to his office in Tribeca, but the tangential nature of a walk allows him to digress into urban planning and the history of the city.

And finally, to remind us of the history of our wandering ways, there’s Edmund White’s classic The Flaneur. I recently picked up a copy on our remainder table–there may even be a few sale copies left–so walk on in for more inspiration!

Over half our staff at Booksmith are writers. So many of us were delighted to hear that AWP (the annual Association of Writers & Writing Programs conference) would be held in Boston this year. Convenient, yes, to have over 10,000 writers, readers, agents, lit mags, editors, and publishers converge on one’s hometown. But I also found myself slightly disappointed not to be able to use the conference as an excuse to see a new place, to stay in a hotel, in short, to travel.

On the exhibition floor.

But attending a conference like AWP is a lot like traveling, even when it takes place on your doorstep. There is nothing so foreign as the landscape of the three gigantic exhibition halls in Hynes Convention Center, crammed with row upon endless row of booths bannered with MFA programs looking for tuition money, lit mags searching for submitters, publishers looking for readers.

If the international cuisine of the Prudential Center food court didn’t transport you to new lands, you could listen to readers from all over the world at one of the many panels on literature, publishing, and almost any aspect of writing culture imaginable. From essayists discussing the urge toward memoir to a conversation over big versus indie publishers, I found that many of these panels were stimulating in the way that travel is, breaking me out of my habitual ways of thinking about writing and pushing me into new practices and points of view.

Outside the convention center, the blizzard blew.

And finally, like travel, a conference introduces you to new people you might otherwise not have had the chance to bump into. People like the Australian woman who bustled into a panel on travel writing and took a seat next to me. She told me she’d never walked through snow before, and I asked if she’d come all the way around the world for AWP.

“No,” she laughed, “I heard some young people talking it up on the bus from New York, and I pricked up my ears.” Her hostel was full of conference-goers as well, and she followed them to Hynes. “I’m meant to be here,” she confided, and told me about the book she had just self-published about her travels around the world. We listened to the panel together, learning how to capture and document that elusive essence of place.

And while a conference, like travel, is exhausting, there were periods of contemplation as well. One evening, after a day of navigating the chaos of the exhibition, I stumbled out of a Grub Street party at a noisy and crowded bar and headed back to Hynes for the keynote speaker. There I found Vets Auditorium full of writers gathered to hear a conversation between poets Derek Walcott and Seamus Heaney.

My brain was fried from the day of speakers, my head was woozy with one drink too many, and my ears were ringing with the bar’s loud music and the louder sound of writers’ networking. I settled into my chair and focused in on the speakers, who were conversing from two armchairs on the stage.

Walcott was saying something about silence, stillness, and serenity, what he called the “prologue before articulation.” As I listened, the noise of networking fell away. “Where silence is,” Walcott said, “real art arrives.”

“Yes,” Heaney nodded, “But you have to be able to dwell in the clamor as well–that is the condition we inhabit.”

Later Heaney would tell us about reading Virgil when he was a school boy in Sixth Form. The required text was Book Nine, but all he remembers about that course was his teacher continually asserting with regret, “I wish it were Book Six, lads, if only it were Book Six.”

Perhaps I had taken in one panel on literary tropes too many, but every word Heaney spoke seemed to hold the potential for metaphor, and now when I think back on the blur that was my trip through the foreign lands of AWP, my sense is that if nothing else, the convention was for me Sixth Form. A conference about art is not art itself, if anything it is the dissonance that distracts us from creation. Yet it is in that chaos that we dwell, and if it is a clamor that points us on to Book Six, to the silence before articulation, then it was a trip worth taking.

Last week, my brother-in-law, who moved to Boston last summer, asked me if McDonalds on the East Coast served up Shamrock shakes for Saint Patrick’s Day, like they did back in the Midwest. A Boston resident for over three years and a fan of–if not the fast food chain–that creamy mint green shake myself, I was ashamed to say I did not know. But I was able to tell him about Dunkin Donuts’ seasonal Irish Creme donut, a sugar coated bun filled with a creme not-quite-green but a shade less yellow than your traditional Boston creme. It’s nothing compared to their autumnal pumpkin donut, but as a novelty item, it’s not a bad way to get yourself primed for St. Patrick’s Day.

Of course, to get a true taste of Ireland, no one goes for the food. This month, we’ve got a range of Irish literature on display, writers who will give you a more accurate glimpse into Irish culture, landscape and cuisine–without the foul aftertaste of American fast food. We’ve got the classics: Yeats and Beckett and Joyce, and Flann O’Brien’s At Swim Two Birds. These guys are the Shamrock Shakes of Irish literature. You’ll want to pick them up again, year after year.

You’ve read Dubliners, but have you read Dublinesque, a new novel by Enrique Vila-Matas set in Dublin as the world of publishers, readers, and writers is losing its hold on Irish culture. The protagonist is a retired literary publisher, but the strong presence of Joyce and Beckett in this novel almost make them characters as well.

And if you’re looking for non-fiction set in Ireland, pick up Robert Kanigel’s On an Irish Island. Kanigel introduces the reader to the lost world of the Great Blasket, an island off the west coast of Ireland, renowned for its former communal life and preservation of the Irish language. Kanigel weaves together the island’s history with the colorful life of its local residents and visiting scholars.

Any of these books would go nicely with a pint of Guinness or, if you can find one out here, a Shamrock shake. Whether you’re looking for a guidebook, map, or simply some good armchair travel, we’ve got them, no artificial flavors added.

A few years ago, as my friend Tera and I were wandering around the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris, I wondered aloud if Proust’s manuscripts were there, either on display or hidden away in some dusty archive. So when we inadvertently befriended a bored security guard, we asked. Unfortunately, neither of us spoke much French. But the guard seemed to understand, became animated, and sent us off down a long hallway with directions to turn at the end. We eagerly complied, only to end up at an exhibit of Louis the Something’s Globes.

Proust’s coveted hand-written drafts of his 3,000 page novel, In Search of Lost Time, have never been on display outside of Paris. When I left the city I thought I had left my chances of ever viewing the spidery scrawl and crowded margins of my favorite author. But now, in celebration of the 100^th anniversary of the publication of Swann’s Way, Proust’s papers have made their way outside of the confines of the Bibliothèque national, and are on display at the Morgan Library in New York City.

In conjunction with these celebrations, 192 Books in Chelsea decided to host “Proust in 24 hours” a 24-hour reading of Swann’s Way. And they decided to hold this event last Tuesday, February 19, in other words: on my 30^th birthday. As could think of no better way to celebrate, reflect on, and downright ponder the passing of time, I decided to go.

I spent the afternoon at the Morgan with Proust. At least, that was what it felt like, as I enclosed myself in the small, cubicle exhibit and poured over his manuscripts. Never mind that his handwriting was illegible and that, while my French has improved somewhat since my miscommunication with the library guard, my continuing education French classes haven’t quite got me up to the speed of, well, Proust’s vocabulary. I remembered that Proust translated his favorite author, Ruskin, without learning English, and I stared at those pages until I began to recognize the passages I had committed to heart.

On the opening page to Swann’s Way, Proust had drawn a bold line through an entire first paragraph. Then, near the bottom, he had penciled in a line so tenuous and faint it was difficult to discern: “Longtemps, je me suis couche de bonne heure.” In another draft on display the famous madeleine was referred to as a “biscotte”—it originally had its source in a commonplace slice of toast. This toast to madeleine transubstantiation will forever stand in my mind as the quintessential transformation of life into art.

Sufficiently immersed in Proust, I dropped my bags at The Jane Hotel and headed up 10^th Ave to 192 Books. The small, one-room carefully curated bookshop was cozily packed with people crowded around a small table where Adam Gopnik and Anka Muhlstein would introduce the 24-hour reading. Champagne was poured and madeleines nibbled as we listened to Gopnik read an exchange of letters between Proust and André Gide, who declined to publish Proust. Muhlstein talked about her new book Monsieur Proust’s Library, a chronicle of the literature Proust both references and draws from in his work. There are over 200 characters in In Search of Lost Time, and a good many of them are readers.

We had quite a few readers that night at 192 books. I felt privileged to be among them as I took my turn at the mike. And while I did not make it through the entire 24 hours, I did stay long enough to hear the madeleine dipped into tea, and of how its taste conjured up a past believed to be lost, the narrator’s panacea, and one for us all, against the forward turning of the years.

I thought that was the end of my Proustian pilgrimage to New York City, but I was wrong. The following day, as I was walking down 5^th Avenue, I glanced in the window of Bergdorf Goodman. The luxury department store had decided to go literary, giving five window displays over to great moments in literature, among them, In Search of Lost Time.

Today was the first day I ventured out to work after the blizzard. The first customer I found in the travel aisle was shivering in front of our wide selection of Caribbean guidebooks. I asked if she needed any help. She peered up at me from beneath a wooly hat and pleaded, “I want to go somewhere warm!”

Don’t we all? That’s why we’re celebrating the sunny Caribbean as our Destination of the Month of February. After puzzling over how to get to Cuba for awhile, my customer determined she would go swim with the migrating whales off the coast of Belize. If, like me, your February will be spent trudging between work and home through ice and snow and sludge, our destination shelf is brimming with titles ready to transport you to the blazing heat of a sun-baked beach.

Travel alongside the erudite classic travel writer, Patrick Leigh Fermor, as he wanders among the old colonial capitals of several Caribbean Islands, including Guadeloupe, Martinique, Barbados, Trinidad, and Haiti. Fermor’s first published travel narrative, Traveller’s Tree, describes the culture and people inhabiting the paradisaical landscape, from steel drum bands to Voodoo practices.

Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean is an engaging history book to supplement your knowledge of the Caribbean Islands and the surrounding waters, which, just after the Spanish Inquisition, were often populated with Jewish Pirates. Edward Kritzler describes the adventures of such ships as the Prophet Samuel and Queen Esther and the prospects of their fascinating crews.

Tropic Death is a collection of short stories set in Barbados, Panama, and other Caribbean landscapes that filled the childhood memories of author Eric Walrond. Although fictional, these vivid depictions of life in the tropics transport the reader into the lives of island residents living in the aftermath of colonialism.  If the Dominican Republic is your destination, Junot Diaz’s short story collection, Drown, reveals the lives of residents of the villages and barrios of the DR. Both of these short story collections would make a great read for a flight to the Caribbean. And of course, for a sultry romp through Puerto Rico, all you have to do is pick up Hunter S. Thompson’s The Rum Diary and you’re off to 1950s San Juan.

If you are looking not only to escape the cold, but also the city, pick up Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place, and let her take you to a ten-by-twelve mile island, her home of Anitgua. Watch the changes that came with colonialism and tourism, and learn about the lives lived out in this small place in the Caribbean.

I had just left the wood floors of Elliot Bay Bookstore and was walking down a rain-sparkled street to one of my favorite cafes, Bauhaus, already anticipating the dim corners and foggy windows that give Bauhaus its romantic and edgy feel–the perfect blend of stimulation and hibernation needed to write the night away. Across the street on the puddled pavement of an empty court of Cal Anderson Park, a game of bike hockey commenced. I passed a drag queen in an elaborate pink evening dress. There was no doubt where I was: the hipster of Seattle’s neighborhoods, Capitol Hill.

While I spent most of my week-long stay in Seattle in the University District, where I used to live and work, I visited almost every neighborhood in the immediate area. Perhaps because of the city’s unique topography–houses and businesses are built up into the hills that rise from the surrounding waters of the Puget Sound, Lake Union, and Lake Washington–Seattle’s neighborhoods are distinct, each with its own atmosphere, its own sub-culture and its own particular breed of residents populating its streets and cafes.

If you are in the U District, the dominate atmosphere is of course, the student population. A walk around the campus in spring time, particularly in the “quad,” is essential–cherry blossoms are everywhere. Be sure to stop in my old stompin’ grounds, the University Bookstore, an independent with a great selection of new and used books. Want more? Head down the back alley to Magus Bookstore, full of used books, and grab a coffee at the hole-in-the-wall cafe, Allegro.  Along University Way are the typical student eateries, with a diverse smattering of Asian cuisine.

I spent a full day in Ballard, where I was amazed to see whole streets full of new, hip cafes and shops that had sprung up in the past few years. Among them were the more familiar bars that still give the neighborhood its old fishing village feel–Coner Byrne a particular favorite of mine. This neighborhood hosts a small independent bookstore that specializes in children’s books, The Secret Garden.

I lived in Queen Anne for a few years, at the bottom of the hill. When I hiked to the top I found small shops and cafes, pricier than other parts of the city, but delightful to spend a day browsing. Among them, Queen Anne Books, set to re-open under new ownership in February. Just across the ship canal and the shockingly blue Freemont Bridge, is Freemont. If Capitol Hill is the “hippest” of Seattle’s neighborhoods, Freemont is the “hippiest” neighborhood in Seattle, defined by its slow pace, its Sunday Market, and of course, more bookshops and cafes. It is all Jamaica Plain aspires to be, and never will be. (I love you JP, I live in you, and I have faith that you will find yourself someday).

I haven’t even touched Wallingford, Belltown, Green Lake, the International District, Magnolia, Maple Leaf, Ravenna, West Seattle or Downtown (where I rode the new Ferris Wheel near Pike Place Market to stunning views of Mount Rainer, the Puget Sound, the Olympic Mountains), but I have to leave something for you to discover on your own. We’ve got a large selection of guidebooks covering the Pacific Northwest to help you on your way.

I usually reserve light reading for the waiting room of my dentist’s office. Maybe that’s why I always get a bad taste in my mouth when flipping through a magazine. Or a headache from the perfume samples. I can never seem to focus on anything between the flimsy covers, registering only advertisements that make me feel bad about how I look. When I finally do get drawn into an article, just when it’s getting good, I turn the page and am lost in another sea of ads.

But a recent screening of our magazine selection at Booksmith has made me feel otherwise. I was curious about the new slew of travel magazines circulating, each with its own unique perspective on place. What I found, among many more commercial-oriented travel publications, were a few magazines that seemed to be skipping down new, unbeaten paths, whether they were honing in on little-known local places, or blowing my mind to new global proportions.

The photographs contained between the stylish covers of Trunk magazine did the latter. Photographer Jason Florio spent 15 years in Gambia to achieve a level of intimacy with the culture that shows in each stunning portrait. Faces look out from the page with an openness and authenticity that could only have been cultivated through trust built over time. Anders Overgaard has captured our destination of the month, Myanmar (Burma) in another series of stunning photographs. And Ayman Oghanna, an Iraqi-British journalist,  takes us directly into the action in Iraq and Afghanistan over the past few years.

In addition to these photographers, the most recent issue of Trunk contains fascinating interviews with artists who use maps as a medium and stories from correspondents from around the world: Athens, Chile, Swaziland, and even our own Massachusetts. By the time I reached the back cover (a rare thing in my magazine reading life) I was whole-heartedly agreeing with Trunk‘s byline: “the world is a fine place.” And that’s not always an easy thing to say.

From global I went local, with the inaugural issue of Local Magazine: A Quarterly of People and Places. If you want an excellent preview to this new project, watch their video that inspired their Kickstarter contributors to, well, kick-start this worthy cause. The magazine–the brainchild of editor-in-chief Daniel Webster Jr.–is based on the belief that, as he writes, “the whistle-stop or post-industrial city has microcosmic importance to the complicated tale of America.”

Webster and his group of entrepreneurial artists and writers select one small-town destination per issue and tell its story. This issue they traveled to Jersey Shore, Pennsylvania where they went to work for Reptileland to better understand local sources of entertainment, talked to the displaced residents of the Riverdale Mobile Home Park, and of course, reviewed the local tavern. Stop in and travel with them to more overlooked destinations, sampling the local color of small-town America.

And finally I turned to The Common, a recent literary journal out of Amherst College that seeks to deliver to the reader a “modern sense of place” through engaging essays, short stories, poetry, and photographs. In this issue, I dabbled in a collection of South African poetry, looked out of editor Jennifer Acker’s high-rise apartment onto Abu Dhabi, in “From the 17th Floor,” and drove to Vegas with Jennifer Haigh’s character, Sandy, and as “the Strip unrolled before them, a throbbing assault of shimmering, bubbling neon,” I saw it, too.

“We live in an increasingly digital world,” Acker, the journal’s founder, writes,  ”but place is not dead…Far from erasing the importance of our surroundings, our mobile modernity creates a hunger for place-based ruminations. Literature provides the vehicle for these travels.” Enjoy the ride.