culture March 07, 2017

Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London by Lauren Elkin

“You don’t need to crunch around in Gore-Tex to be subversive, if you’re a woman,” writes Lauren Elkin, author of the wide-ranging and inspiring new book about walking in the city, Flâneuse. “Just walk out your front door.”

Elkin holds a PhD from CUNY and the Université de Paris VII, and has written essays for the New York Times Book Review, the London Review of Books, and the Times Literary Supplement. In Flâneuse, she recalls the initial thrill of exploring New York City in her early twenties, and the sense of astonishment she feels in other cities, in particular Paris, where she has lived

culture August 01, 2013

Life in Beirut

Nobody died. But Beirut is engulfed in flames, cars are mangled, glass is under foot, dozens are bleeding, and a faction of rebels claims responsibility. Shopkeepers roll gates; kids are yanked out of school. A day later, however, traffic is so thick and life so normal that it can take an hour to get across town.

culture March 13, 2013

Public Apology by Dave Bry

Dave Bry is sorry. For several years, mostly for the New York website The Awl, he's reached back into a sordid, New Jersey/New York past, unearthing misdeeds big and small. If you imagined each of these stories as a moral sustenance, Bry has for years now been serving up dark and funny snacks. Assembled rather expertly for his book Public Apology, they now qualify as something more satisfying, like a turkey dinner on how (not) to live.

Early in the book, Bry recounts a story about visiting Paris, where the young author—then a preteen traveling with his family—watches a horror movie that gives

Nathan Deuel