What Would Jane Austen Do? (Advice)

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Dear Jane, I’m planning a trip with my significant other and we have very different travel styles. I love to relax and take it slow, while my partner wants to see and do as much as possible. How can we compromise and plan a trip that accommodates both of our preferences? Sincerely, Tired of the […]

The Radiant Body

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By Oksana Marafioti, (An excerpt from “All Of Us Fragile And Brave”) Lina and I boarded our bus in Prague and arrived in Brno, where later that afternoon, I was scheduled to read from my book at the Brno Museum of Romani Culture. Lina, as my book translator, would be reading in Czech. Before this […]

Storage Space

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By Heidi Fisher, My parents’ house is bigger than mine. It is cleaner, better organized, certainly quieter. Retired, my mom has no shortage of time to sort, tidy, and redecorate, which results in me being dragged upstairs to an extra closet to reclaim old prom dresses, to the garage to receive packets of seeds and […]

Al Gofa Interview: Transcending Genres

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By Jean Marc Ah-Sen. Montreal-based comics artist Al Gofa has built a career testing out creative ways to mix genres. In his debut graphic novel Chevalier Bataille (Knight Battle,) Gofa reworked key elements of the war story until it aligned with the structure of the quest narrative. His follow-up Dark Angels of Darkness featured gladiatorial […]

Does “Death of an Author” spell the Death of Authors?

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By Leah Eichler, James Ledbetter, the executive editor at the Observer, whom I had the pleasure of working with several years ago at Reuters, revealed a cryptic piece of gossip in his Facebook feed earlier this week. He said that a large corporation that makes oodles of money publishing horoscopes to paying readers has quietly […]

Gordon Lightfoot’s Music Was The Soundtrack to My Life

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By Bruce Farrell Rosen, He had opened the show that night of June 9, 1978 at the Santa Barbara County Bowl with the words to Summertime Dream. It was that time between finishing up the senior year of college at U.C. Santa Barbara and graduation ceremony just a few days away.  The early summer sun […]

What Would Jane Austen Do?

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In today’s column, Jane tackles the food obsessed and the case of the sperm donor brother. Have a question for Jane? Email it to editor@esotericamag.com. Dear Jane, One of my long-time friends is annoyingly obsessed with food. Every time we eat out together, she’s analyzing each dish, getting abnormally excited by an unusual flavor or […]

Billionaires Vs. Broadcasters

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By Leah Eichler, Years ago, I ran the Reuters Online Newsroom, a global operation that determined what news we produced would find its way somewhere on the Internet. It was a 24-hour news operation that followed the sun, which meant I would regularly visit our overnight crew covering Asia, or the early morning crew covering […]

Who Gets to Tell the Story of the Holocaust?

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By Leah Eichler I wrote a rather dismissive book review for a The Globe and Mail in Canada in 2002 on a novella called I was Hitler’s Cat by N. J. Dodic. The book appears to be out of print and my own copy disappeared many years ago, but I’ve often thought of that book, […]

Holmes is Where the Heart Is

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By Robert Basler, “My name is Sherlock Holmes. It is my business to know what other people do not know.”    The librarian knew me well. I was 11 years old and was no stranger to the dusty bookshelves at School 91, in Indianapolis. I loved biographies, science fiction and boyhood adventures, to be sure, […]