I live in the 02138 zip code, popularly known around here as “the nation’s most opinionated zip code,” thanks to the hordes of Harvard and MIT students. I’m not sure about that title–94720 could probably give it some competition–but I like the idea that a zip code, which is really just an arbitrary zone, [...]

Google Lit Trips uses Google Earth to show readers important locations in works of literature. For example, if you’re reading The Grapes of Wrath, you can follow the Joads’ travel along Route 66, or while reading Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy, you can track the kid from Texas to Mexico and beyond.
The [...]

What is it about the European cultures, tucked like bats into their tiny cubbies, that seems so much more specific than our own? How do Belgium or Luxembourg achieve “culture” in little more space we might use to construct a Wal-Mart megastore? What is it about confinement that breeds a more tribal than national identity? What are we doing when we sit down to read a collection of fiction culled from a continent?