Several days after I arrived in Havana I asked my host why all the toilet seats were missing. “We don’t use them here,” he replied, as if it were an…
From Secondhand Time, an oral history of post-Soviet Russia compiled by Svetlana Alexievich and published last month by Random House. Alexievich is the winner of the 2015 Nobel Prize in…
By Dorothea Tanning, from a letter written to Muriel Streeter in May 1947 and published in the most recent issue of A Public Space. Tanning was an artist and writer. Streeter…
When we are asked if we like children, we are used to saying that it depends upon the child; that we like some children, just as we like some grown…
I never knew just when I passed the border into Germany because no frontier official stopped me. I thought it odd that there should be a border warfare so recently…