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Brazil is in the news again. Just as FIFA World Cup celebrations two years ago were marred by popular protests in Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and elsewhere in response to exorbitant public spending on the event, while public services
At what point should a journalist transmute first-hand experience into fiction? Where does one draw the line between what can be reported as fact and what should probably be reported some other way, even if one has seen it with
When I departed Australia for Spain last year, I had my Kindle packed and ready. My reading had been planned in advance: Booker winners and Russian classics and theses on the nature of democracy—a library’s worth of books at my
On April 15, 2013, two pressure-cooker bombs exploded near the finish line of the Boston Marathon, killing three people and wounding more than two hundred and sixty. The media—mainstream and citizen, offline and on—went into round-the-clock torches-and-pitchforks mode, misidentifying suspects,
I started Graham Greene’s The Quiet American in my room on Ho Chi Minh City’s Bùi Viện backpacker strip. I probably should have started it at the Hotel Continental, where Thomas Fowler first meets Alden Pyle, but the Continental is
In January, Picador reissued Michael Herr’s classic book on the Vietnam War, Dispatches, and with today marking the 40th anniversary of the Fall of Saigon now seems the perfect time to revisit the book’s pyrotechnic prose and harrowing, still-relevant lessons.
The tradition of prison literature goes back a long way and can be roughly divided into two sub-genres: books written after the fact—Dostoevsky’s The House of the Dead, Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom—and those that were penned behind bars:
Does the world really need another book about writers eking out a living at the beginning of their careers, another portrait of artists as young men? The age-old, slightly disingenuous adage to write what you know often appears to have