Category: Nonfiction

In December 2006/January 2007, Lucy Knisley took a six-week trip to Paris with her mother to celebrate her mother’s fiftieth birthday and Lucy’s twenty-second. French Milk is Knisley’s travel journal from that trip, and it’s a pleasing combination of photos, text, and drawings (Knisley is a cartoonist). I love all the Parisian details of this…

This short but satisfying book, which features (really pleasing) photographs by Richard Baker, is the story of de Botton’s week as “writer-in-residence” at Heathrow’s Terminal 5. He explores the airport and its environs, from the Sofitel hotel where he’s staying for the week to the office of the CEO of British Airways, and talks to…

In “South Downs Way,” Will Self writes about how he has “taken to long-distance walking as a means of dissolving the mechanised matrix which compresses the space-time continuum, and decouples human from physical geography” (69). Which is a mouthful, and perhaps a bit tongue-in-cheek, but also kind of excellent: he’s walking, in part, to remind…

Though I didn’t go to any events at the Conflux Festival this year, it nevertheless seemed like the weekend of the festival would be an apt weekend to start reading this book, which I checked out from the library a while ago. The festival, which used to be called Psy.Geo.Conflux, is centered on psychogeography, a…

“Utopia is in a bad way,” this book starts, then follows with this definition: “Utopia can be broadly defined as any exuberant plan or philosophy intended to perfect life lived collectively” (3). Not many pages later, Hallman lets us know where he stands, which is in favor of this exuberance: “the utopian flame should not…

James doesn’t only write, in the essays in English Hours, about the physicalities of a place: he’s also writing about culture and history, about the American temperament and the English temperament (or at least, about an American’s impression of them), about the majesty of Anglican services and American twinges of jealousy at all the richness…

Henry James is one of my favorite writers: I love his long sentences, the way the make me slow down when reading: both in the sense that I often have to slow down, because of their length and twistiness, and in the sense that I want to slow down, to better savor the way they’re…

Leda Meredith, when she talks about eating local food, speaks from experience: in 2007-2008 she embarked on “The 250”: a year of eating, “almost exclusively foods grown or raised within a 250-mile radius” of her apartment (1). I’m impressed. My own six-day attempt at eating foods from within a radius of about 200 miles from…