In May 1982, the Argentine writer Julio Cortázar and his third wife, Carol Dunlop, embarked on a curious expedition. With their trusty VW camper van, dubbed Fafner after Wagner’s dragon, they set out to drive from Paris to Marseille, intending to discover the other thruway, the parallel path hidden in plain sight, along the autoroute. The better to gain access to that imagined place, the couple established some rules: They would not once leave the highway; they would explore each rest stop, at a rate of two a day; they would take detailed notes on their findings; and, like Marco

Have you ever watched what happens when a sword slices through reams of paper? Or a fish is put into water? What does it look like when centrifugal force pops a man out of his shirt? Yuichi Yokoyama wants to show you. Concerned with phenomena rather than character and narrative, his comics resemble the output of a drafting machine: sequences that present multiple views of an object in action and look like exploded product diagrams. Yokoyama seems to enjoy the resulting images as much for the strange shapes that are generated as for what they reveal.

Canadian cartoonist Julie Doucet retired from comics in 1999 after the publication of her critically acclaimed My New York Diary. Her straightforward depictions of life as a broke artist and of her rampant id, as well as her imaginings of what she would do if she woke up as a man (for the most part, delightedly shaving her face, finding alternate uses for her penis, and dreaming about performing homosexual acts with the Monkees’ Micky Dolenz), were exhilarating for their honesty and bluntness.

“Poor Charlie,” the Kingston Trio sang, “may ride forever ’neath the streets of Boston,” his trip on the MTA subway having gone awry because of a nickel increase. But fare change or no, navigating any big-city transit system is a task that would daunt even Theseus. The world’s largest—those in Paris, New York, London, Tokyo, […]

Jhumpa Lahiri has boasted an enviable literary career since nabbing the Pulitzer Prize for her 1999 debut story collection, Interpreter of Maladies, which introduces Indians and Indian Americans grappling with, among other things, deracination and assimilation. In 2006, an adaptation of Lahiri’s second book, The Namesake, by celebrated filmmaker Mira Nair, earned the kind of praise her internationally best-selling novel drew three years earlier. Lahiri’s new story collection, Unaccustomed Earth (Knopf), should have no problem upholding her reputation. In the stories, some of which she began to write while working on The Namesake, we encounter first-generation Indian Americans—often married to

So,” I say to Daniel Menaker, a former fiction editor at the New Yorker and for six years a senior editor at Random House, later executive editor in chief. “How did you get into an editorial career?” He looks me straight in the eye and says, “How did you get into one?” Asking questions while […]

The prolific anthologist and writer Alberto Manguel has become, since the publication in 1996 of A History of Reading, one of the foremost gentleman scholars of books and the act of consuming them. In 2000, he wrote Reading Pictures: A History of Love and Hate, which narrates the stories told by an idiosyncratic selection of artworks and images, and he followed that in 2004 with A Reading Diary, which chronicles his experience rereading twelve favorite books in a year. Now, in The Library at Night, Manguel meditates on repositories of books, his thoughts provoked by the construction, next to his

I grew up in the town of Enniscorthy, in the southeast of Ireland. Every year in the summer, we held a strawberry fair, and every year, too, the elders would meet to select a Strawberry Queen. One year, they asked a contestant what she would do with the prize money if she won. “I’d feck off to England,” she said.