Frank Carlson Library

The best new writing, photography, art, and reportage from and about California-in the "rich and engrossing" series for travelers and armchair travelers (Times Literary Supplement). From the Gold Rush to Hollywood's golden age to the rise of Silicon Valley, California has long stood as the brightest symbol of the American dream. In recent years, however, the country's mainstream media has been declaring with increasing frequency-and thinly veiled...

Since its earliest interactions with the West, India has been the object of a gross misinterpretation, a vague association with ideas of peace, spiritualism, the magic of the fakirs. Constantly reframed and mythologized by Westerners fleeing their supposedly rationalist societies, India continues to fascinate with its millennia-old history, shrines on every street corner, ancient beliefs and rituals, and unique linguistic and cultural diversity. Today...

The best new writing, photography, art, and reportage from and about Rome-in the series that's "like a literary vacation" (Publishers Weekly). If you believe recent chatter about Rome-in the media and by its residents-the city is on the verge of collapse. Each year, it slips further down the ranking of the world's most livable cities. To the problems faced by all large capitals-hit-and-run tourism, traffic, the divide between elegant, Airbnb-dominated...

Explore Japanese society in the lively series that collects the best new writing, photography, art, and reportage from around the world. Visitors from the West look with amazement, and sometimes concern, at Japan's social structures and unique, complex culture industry; the gigantic scale of its tech corporations and the resilience of its traditions; the extraordinary diversity of the subcultures that flourish in its "post-human" megacities. The...

Turkish culture and history is explored in the wide-ranging series that is "like a literary vacation" (Publishers Weekly). The birth of the "New Turkey," as the country's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has called his own creation, is an exemplary story of the rise of "illiberal democracies" through the erosion of civil liberties, press freedom, and the independence of the judicial system. Turkey was a complex country long before the rise of its new...