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[...] I was devoting a lot of energy to the morbid avoidance of colds, because whenever I got a cold I couldn't write or smoke, and whenever I couldn't write or smoke I couldn't feel smart, and feeling smart was pretty much my only defense against the word. [...]

[...] This was in 1979. I was exclusively reading great literature (Kafka, Goethe), and although I could forgive Ekström for not understanding what a serious person I'd become, I had zero interest in opening a book with such a lurid cover. [...]

nestled between a stricly protected montane forest and the bright-blue freshwater expanses of Dong Qian Hu

[...] China in general, in its headlong pursuit of money, with fabulous millionaries and a vast underclass and a dismantled social safety net, and with a central government obsessed with security and skilled at exploiting natonalism to quiet its critics, and with economic and environmental regulati…