"Poetry was declining/ Painting advancing/ we were complaining/ it was '50," recalled poet Frank O'Hara in 1957. Criminal Ingenuity traces a series of linked moments in the history of this transfer of cultural power from the sphere of the word to that of the image. Ellen Levy explores the New York literary and art worlds in the years that bracket O'Hara's lament through close readings of the works and careers of poets Marianne Moore and John Ashbery and assemblage artist Joseph Co...

When E.J. Levy arrived in northern Brazil on a fellowship from Yale at the age of 21, she was hoping to help save the Amazon rain forest; she didn’t realize she would soon have to save herself.Amazons: A Love Story recounts an idealistic young woman’s coming of age against the backdrop of the magnificent rain forest and exotic city of Salvador. This elegant and sharp-eyed memoir explores the interaction of the many forces fueling deforestation—examining the ecological, eco...

“Like settling down with a Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel—if it was rewritten by James M. Cain.”—Denver PostMichael Gruber’s Night of the Jaguar—like his earlier novels featuring Miami detective Jimmy Paz (Tropic of Night, Valley of Bones)—transforms the conventional thriller into something extraordinary, taking the crime novel to a place it has never gone before. Combining a grisly murder investigation with chilling supernatural elements a...

Few writers are as integrally bound to a place as Pablo Neruda was to the landscape of Isla Negra on Chile’s coast. From his arrival there in the late 1930s to his death in 1973, Neruda captured Isla Negra in images fundamental to an understanding of his work. It was, according to Martin Espada, at Isla Negra where Neruda "in the company of his muse, walked alongside the source of his most lyrical inspiration, the sea...and discovered a new way of seeing, as the ocean became a living metap...

Some years ago, the author of these columns was sitting in a Zen monastery in California, blissfully meditating, when someone slipped a folded note, underneath his cushion. The note had the word Help, and no other information, except for an email address. When he wrote to the email address, to inquire as to what Help, exactly, was needed, he received only the response, Thank you. Two days later he received a second email advising him that someone of importance had greatly enjoyed reading t...

Jane Doe lives in the shadows under an assumed name. A once-promising anthropologist and an expert on shamanism, everyone thinks she's dead. Or so she hopes.Jimmy Paz is a Cuban-American police detective. Straddling two cultures, he understands things others cannot.When the killings start -- a series of ritualistic murders -- all of Miami is terrified. Especially Jane. She knows the dark truth that Jimmy must desperately search to uncover. As their lives slowly interconnect...

Carol Merchasin first visited San Miguel de Allende in 2005, fell in love with its language, people, and culture, and moved there full-time with her husband shortly thereafter. A lawyer by training, Merchasin is curious about how everything around her in Mexico works—the health care system, religious rituals, loaning money, small change at the market, narcotrafficantes, telenovelas, and the subtleties between the verbs ser and estar. An intrepid researcher, she informally consults her neig...

A fictionalised portrait of the intense and prolific life of artist Frida Kahlo from the bestselling author of Wild and Kith'A wonderful book. It's like a dress that Kahlo invented for herself and wore' John Berger'I am transported and transformed; I feel lucky to have read it and it leaves me in awe' Lemn Sissay_________________________"I am Frida but also I am not Frid...

In 2004 I compiled a book entitled "I Remember It Well", comprised of letters home, travel essays and extracts from my diaries covering a twenty month period, following the completion of my university studies, from 1965-1967, during which time I hitchhiked, youth-hosteled and worked my way throughout most of Western Europe. I concluded that document by noting that over the intervening years I continued to travel abroad and indicated that I was planning a five week trip to Australia in Nove...

Unlock the more straightforward side of The Old Man and the Sea with this concise and insightful summary and analysis!This engaging summary presents an analysis of The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway, one of the author’s most famous and widely acclaimed novels. After 84 days without a big catch, the elderly fisherman Santiago takes to the open sea, where he wages a three-day struggle against a tenacious swordfish only to see his prize snat...

In 1967 with almost no money I traveled from the Galapagos Islands to California, through Ecuador, Colombia,Central America, and Mexico. My recollections of the experience are more about the people I met along the way, rather than a description of places and things. It was a very different world then.

Crazy adventures in Central America from the author that brought you the "Trip Around the Sun" series of books. Here she brings more tales of adventure, this time in Panama, Costa Rica and Nicaragua. She ponders whether to stay on the bus when a blind man takes the driver's seat, and whether coming to the wild west town in the Nicaraguan mountains really was a good idea after all. Should she be worried that Panama's roads are being shut down or that she's stuck on a Caribbean isl...