JENNIFER ACKER
To get anywhere from the borgo—the walled-in cluster of medieval houses and skinny lanes connecting the castle, the church, and a tiny grassy square—one must go steeply downhill and then steeply up. Each morning, I choose a different high point from which to take in the magnetic hills of this corner of Lunigiana in northwest Tuscany, where friends have made a part-time home.

Liesl is just 25 years old when Dr. Frank Kappus, a reconstructive surgeon at a medical spa in a remote German village called Hannesburg, initiates a brief courtship following the death of his wife in childbirth, which has left him with three young boys, including the newborn.

When a boat dies, you usually have two choices: pay hundreds of dollars to have it hauled away, or let it molder and sink into some secluded corner of the yard.

JAMES ALAN GILL | Along with this, post-revolutionary America needed to create a national identity that put it on equal standing with the Old World.

In All Our Names, the Ethiopian-born novelist Dinaw Mengestu tells the story of two Isaacs and a Helen living, loving, and leaving each other—apparently in the 1970s.

STEPHEN O’CONNOR 
We decided to start with a con. She was small, with blonde hair and an unidentifiable accent that gave her voice the warped vowels and ee-haw rhythms of a handsaw. She approached him on the footbridge, made a startled noise, and looked down.

AMY LAWLESS, JONATHAN MOODY, ELIZABETH HAZEN, ISHION HUTCHINSON, R. ZAMORA LINMARK, SARAH WELLS, CLIFF FORSHAW
Two cactus branches pointed at different suns/ who’s right who’s wrong?/ myself evaporating: minute turns into other minutes –/ the minutes of later minutes later/ pooling into an hour, a puddle/ two things to do on this day

Begin with the cover of Dragon Logic: double Garamond italic ampersands. Inverted they propose elegant dragons against a green hide background.

SAHIBA GILL
There was no after-the-rain smell when I was in Varanasi, not even along the river Ganges where waters are wide in January; the white fog curtain erases the farthest bank so that just sky, boats, and water make up the shore. In the city’s brown streets, trash runs steadily through silt-carved gullies. Waste sandcastles build in its empty lots. A diverse and growing mud stews beneath its stilt-top shops. I am a guest in a brownstone in Benares, as locals call their city, a few narrow alley turns behind a main road down a path too narrow to collect anything but chai cups and manure.

SCOTT GEIGER
“We have the mind, body, and the mind/body all organizing this building,” offers architect Chris McVoy, metaphorically describing the Campbell Sports Center that opened this fall at Columbia University. The building is the outward expression of an athlete’s inner journey. In a short film, McVoy and his partner and mentor, Steven Holl, discuss their design intentions and the character of experience they’ve created.