There was a time when mapmakers named the places they travelled through with the names of lovers rather than their own.

Before the real city could be seen it had to be imagined, the way rumours and tall tales were a kind of charting.

Githa Hariharan's fiction is wonderful-full of subtleties and humor and tenderness.

all this Beethoven and rain

Most of the time in our world, truth is just opinion.

Snap. Lady with dog. Lady on sofa half-naked. Snap. Naked lady. Lady next to dresser. Lady at window. Snap. Lady on balcony sunlight. (On New Orleans photographer E. J. Bellocq)

She had grown older. And he loved her more now than he had loved her when he understood her better, when she was the product of her parents. What she was now was what she herself had decided to become.