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Over the past five years, France has witnessed, bemused, the emergence of a very special breed of master’s programs—in creative writing. Today, in a country that’s supposedly one of the cradles of Western literature (or so we French love to believe), there are, all in all, three such programs.
Though it’s less travel writing and more personal memoir, Laurence Sterne’s A SENTIMENTAL JOURNEY THROUGH FRANCE AND ITALY contains one of the most authentic, challenging descriptions of why one might journey from their home in the first place.
Being a lover of food and memoirs, I have a dream of living in a foreign country, especially in Europe, for a year and writing about its food customs.
If Julia Child and Avis deVoto were here today, they’d be great Facebook friends. Julia and Avis bonded over food—buying it, cooking it and eating it. But since they were without technology, they wrote letters, which Joan Reardon collected into a book titled As Always, Julia: The Letters of Julia Child and Avis DeVoto.
Apart from their cosmopolitanism, their interest in baroque aesthetics, and their mutual disdain, Carpentier and Sarduy shared a passion that shaped their writing and, through them, the course of Cuban letters: African American music.
Behold: a diacritic has got an entire country in an uproar. And of course that country is France. Let’s rewind a bit: in 1990, the Académie Française, prestigious gatekeeper of all things French, proposes a spelling reform that generates countless pamphlets and petitions to “save the French language.” Ultimately nothing much happens, the old spellings…
I always get my hair cut when I’m in Mexico City. I have weird hair and a barber who knows how to cut it. He’s the kind of barber that slick-slacks his scissors between snips, between syllables too so that when he talks—about sports, cars, the news, anything—his speech falls from his mouth like a…
Whenever I drive to my real local library or the Barnes & Noble near my house, I’m always disappointed I can find a parking space so easily. Trust me, I love convenience. But where is everyone? What are they doing that’s more fun than browsing the shelves? Every man keeps a few secrets from his…
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