It is not a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a motorcycle must be in want of a wife, and yet Carlyle Black, protagonist of George Elliott Clarke’s new novel, spends a good deal of time in pursuit of one. Although it opens with musings on the hard truths of pavement and the allure of the open…
Jamie Zeppa
Jamie Zeppa is author of a memoir, Beyond the Sky and the Earth: A Journey into Bhutan (Random House, 2000), and a novel, Every Time We Say Goodbye (Knopf, 2011).
Articles by
Jamie Zeppa
Impossible Journey
In Martha Baillie’s novel, a German photographer looks for Nature freed from history. May 2015
Heinrich Schlögel, son of a prosperous German hop farmer, and his sister Inge first encounter the Arctic as children in the early 1970s, in books. Inge begins teaching herself Inuktitut from a kit she found in the school cafeteria, and Heinrich, at his sister’s urging, reads the 1771 journal of Samuel Hearne.
The mode of this encounter—through text—is at the heart of Martha Baillie’s new…
The Personal and Political Entwined
A Canadian’s carefully observed memoir of a dark and violent place October 2009
Early on in Burmese Lessons: A Love Story, Karen Connelly notices something about the way she talks. At a dinner party in Bangkok, while journalists and consultants create in board strokes what might be called the Bigger Picture—the history of Burma and region, an encyclopedia of issues—Connelly finds she is “always reaching for the…
The Struggle of Memory against Forgetting
Intertwining tales of evil show that atrocities can disappear without a trace April 2008
In Cloud of Bone, Bernice Morgan draws our attention to the smallest descriptive detail in order to achieve a deeply moral aim: to show the myriad things that connect us across oceans and centuries. Early on, for example, she places a character in a small dark hole under a church and then haunts him with the memory of a valley “no wider than a…