Mexico

The writer on depicting disenchantment, chasing the imagination, and retelling the stories she collected as a child in Mexico.

A photojournalist discusses the stories behind his images of immigration in an age of militarized border enforcement.

We lived in the constrictive belt of bible-thumpers, but I always wanted my life to unfurl like a beach read, the kind of life that conjures a certain ephemeral pleasure, baked between sand and sun, crashing waves far enough away so their fatal danger only registers as ambiance.

“Moving bodies generate this system. They create, supposedly, some justification to play this market out.”

The author’s first novel is set in Mexico City, but its themes of violence, grief, and solitude are truly global.

The nth volume of interviews by curator Hans Ulrich Obrist gathers fourteen conversations with surviving luminaries of an era of Mexican culture that in hindsight is nothing short of magnificent, despite its under-recognized or somewhat forgotten status abroad.

Urban planning and the Edenic garden, from Cicero to Borges; and universal knowledge and the public library, from Boulee to Kalach’s own soaring Vasconcelos Library.