by Elatia Harris All photos courtesy of Rachel Laudan Rachel Laudan is the prize-winning author of The Food of Paradise: Exploring Hawaii’s Culinary Heritage, and a co-editor of the Oxford Companion to the History of Modern Science. In this interview, Rachel and I talk about her new book, Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History,…

Arrow and Cockle Shell. Copyright Alison Harris By Elatia Harris Their 50th birthdays in sight, the acclaimed travel writer David Downie, and his wife, the photographer Alison Harris, decided that trekking from Paris, where they live, to Spain, would be just the thing. The Way of St. James, for a millennium one of the world's…

By Elatia Harris Cover photo of Brief, snow globe and screenshots from Brief, courtesy of Jaded Ibis Press Alexandra Chasin is a Brooklyn-based writer who turned to fiction with her acclaimed collection, Kissed By (FC2, 2007). Her new work, Brief (Jaded Ibis Press, 2012), is an app novel for the iPad — the first-ever literary…

by Elatia Harris L., Cover, Girl in White, by Sue Hubbard, Cinnamon, 2012. The painting is Portrait of Myself on my Fifth Wedding Annivesary, by Paula Modersohn Becker, 1906, the Boettcherstrasse Museum, Bremen. R., Sue Hubbard, photo by Derek Adams, suehubbard.com Sue Hubbard is an award-winning poet, novelist and critic, based in London, who has…

View from Marais Window: Footprints in the Snow, 2005, copyright Alison Harris by Elatia Harris In 1986, San Francisco-born David Downie, a scholar and multilingual translator, moved to Paris, into a real garret — a maid's room, in fact — to write himself into another way of life. Fresh from Milan, his marriage to a…

Cover of Home Boy, HarperCollins India edition, 2010, cover painting by Faiza Butt Below, author photo by David Williams Elatia Harris In his excellent blog Work Product, Matt Wilkens ballparks the number of English language long form prose fiction volumes published globally, every year, at about 100,000. Not all these works aspire to the condition…

Top, And the vacuum cleaner swallows its bag. Oil on canvas, 72″ x 84″, 2010 Bottom, Shotgun Accident. Oil on canvas, 62″ x 50″, 2009 All images courtesy of Kate Vrijmoet Elatia Harris Kate Vrijmoet, the Seattle-based painter and conceptual artist, is having a year that Carlos Castaneda might recognize as a slice of that…

Elatia Harris The child on the left rests her hand atop the head of the other, working her fingers gently through smooth hair like her own into the scalp. Her expression is inspectorial, proprietary – and openly so. The other gazes out at us – nonplussed, plotting. You know without being told that these two…

Elatia Harris Thanks to Brian D'Amato not only for the interview but for original visual images not available elsewhere. Above, Koh's Game, copyright Brian D'Amato In the early '90s, the artist and writer Brian D'Amato published Beauty, an international bestseller about cosmetic surgery and young love gone wrong, badly wrong. Back then, it was all…

Left: Sophie Calle, Etoile dancer at the Opera de Paris, Marie Agnes Gillot, (detail) Take Care of Yourself, 2007. Image copyright ADAGP Courtesy Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin, Paris/Miami; Arndt & Partner. Berlin/Zurich; Koyanagi, Tokyo; Gallery Paula Cooper, NY Right: John Baldessari, Pure Beauty 1966-68, acrylic on canvas, 1152.5 x 1152.5 x 34.9 mm. Image copyright John…

Self-portrait with Masks (detail), 1899, Menard Art Museum, Komaki City, Japan Elatia Harris James Ensor, the Belgian painter, died in 1949, having done his last searing work half a century earlier. The man in the sea of masks, above, was wrapping it up in the studio even as he painted this self-portrait at age 40.…

Amelia Vega dancing at Bar Cardamomo, Madrid. All photos courtesy of Randolyn Zinn. Randolyn Zinn The way she moves her slender waist pleases the eyes and the soul. — Abu l-Hajjaj ibn ‘Utba, 13th c., Sevilla You go scattering, as you walk, roses and lilies. — traditional flamenco Alegrias lyric In Spain earlier this year,…

Elatia Harris Earlier this year, Affinity Konar, a former 3 Quarks Daily blogger, published her first novel, The Illustrated Version of Things (Fiction Collective Two, April 2009.) One of the very few 3QD columnists to post short fiction, her pieces were received in a way that suggests the form has a future here. Her novel,…

Elatia Harris Not long ago, I was leafing through an old notebook, of the kind kept by artists on the prowl for imagery. I found some 16th century recipes I’d copied out, lines rich with imagery that never made it into a painting. “If you yearn to turn a woman green,” one recipe urged, “decoct…

Graphics by Kate Vrijmoet Elatia Harris It is 2 a.m., and I am in my reading chair, building a list of modifiers that people set on writing about their animals had better shun. Here are a few. little sweet sweet little angelic sweet angelic little furry sweet angelic furry little tiny sweet tiny furry little…

                  Elatia Harris One autumn decades ago, my then husband and I drove around France, hunting down art masterpieces. We were young and in no hurry to go home, on a mission to be swept off our feet. And France was very obliging that way.  We should have been…

   Above, Basket of Wild Strawberries, 1761, private collection, and Still Life with Fish (detail),1769, J. Paul Getty Museum, by Jean-Baptiste-Simeon Chardin  All food photography below courtesy of Karen Peters. Use the titles to search her blog for the recipes. Elatia Harris Recently, I embarked on one of those side trips that committed foodies can…

    Elatia Harris This is the third in an open-ended series of articles about saffron. Part I highlights the culture that produced the renowned saffron-gathering murals dating to the 17th century, B.C.E., on the Aegean island of Santorini. Part II is an examination of saffron in classical mythology, with particular regard to the representation…

Elatia Harris Ever since she married and divorced four times within six months and entered into a state-sanctioned civil union with a woman in Hungary – all of it for art’s sake, but all of it legal and binding – Alix Lambert has had my attention. In the photo below by Dan Monick, we see…

  Elatia Harris The year I was 9, I made every effort to turn Japanese.  I padded around the house in tabi and a kimono, elongated my eyes with my mother’s make-up – she wasn’t using it  – and did up my long dark hair in what I regarded as geisha poufs anchored with chopsticks.…