The current New Yorker presents travel accounts by several well-regarded writers. Pankaj Mishra describes a train-trip to Tibet. The article is not available online, but here’s a taste:

Once, a herd of antelope skipped beside the tracks. Looking for more of them, I saw black nomad tents on a distant hillside. Yaks with white stripes on their backs appeared in the dank yellow grass. The train whizzed past empty stations; on the rare occasion that we stopped, there were hardly any Tibetans to be seen. This seemed the strangest aspect of a rail service designed to benefit local people: their meagre presence outside as well as inside the train.

pankaj-mishra-tibet

From an interview with Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Heller:

PLAYBOY: What are you working on, Kurt?

VONNEGUT: On a divorce. Which is a full-time job. Didn’t you find it a full-time job?

HELLER: Oh, it’s more than a full-time job. You ought to go back and read that section in No Laughing Matter on the divorce. I went through all the lawyers. But yours is going to be a tranquil one, you told me.

VONNEGUT: It seems to me divorce is so common now. It ought to be more institutionalized. It’s like a head-on collision every time. It’s supposed to be a surprise but it’s commonplace. Deliver your line about never having dreamed of being married.

HELLER: It’s in Something Happened: ‘’I want a divorce; I dream of a divorce. I was never sure I wanted to get married. But I always knew I wanted a divorce.'’

Listen to this podcast.

(From Elegant Variation)

Mama’s Saris arrived in the mail yesterday–and since then I have had to read the book to my daughter about a dozen times. The story by Pooja Makhijani is simple and filled with small details that inspire wonder in a little girl’s mind. And the drawings by Elena Gomez are often gorgeous.

pooja-makhijani-saris