Photo credit: Janet Donovan
Did you know that architecture was once an Olympic sport? According to Stranger’s Guide Magazine: “International Olympic Committee founder Pierre de Coubertin, a historian with a love for ancient Greece, considered art an essential part of the competition. In 1912, he finally succeeded in his efforts to include art categories in the games, and they enjoyed a long run in the competition before being pulled after the 1948 competition. (Olympic officials eventually defined artists as professionals, who thus shouldn’t compete in events designed for amateurs at the time.)”
Did you know or do you even want to know that an 1852 edition of John Milton’s Poetical Works was bound in the skin of a murderer, George Cudmore. “The practice of binding books in human skin—known as anthropodermic bibliopegy—wasn’t as unusual as you might imagine. The Anthropodermic Book Project (yes, it’s a real thing), has so far identified 18 books globally that were bound that way. During the French Revolution, there were rumors that a tannery for human skin existed just outside Paris for this purpose.”
Publisher Abby Rapoport was honored at a party in Washington, DC for the latest issue at The Russia House on Connecticut Avenue. Guests soaked up Russian cocktails and vodka. The feature story took a deep dive into Russia’s capital city with reporting and commentary from some of Moscow’s best writers and photographers. “Moscow is in the headlines—but how much do you know about Russia’s capital? This issue offers a fascinating look at the city, from its Soviet past to the current rule of Vladimir Putin, from rap battles and night life to political repression and rapid change, featuring work by Dmitry Bykov, Ludmila Ulitskaya, Michael Idov, Lara Vapnyar and many other great writers on what’s happening to the city that everyone’s talking about.”
Pamela Sorensen
So what exactly is Stranger’s Guide? “We’re a new kind of magazine,” Abby told us. “At Stranger’s Guide, we believe a place is made up of many stories – some beautiful, some troubling, all compelling. Each print issue of Stranger’s Guide explores a single location through photo essays and long-form writing. Online, Stranger’s Guide is a global archive of excellent and unexpected place-based writing. Our Winter issue explores Moscow. This issue offers a fascinating look at the city with compelling essays and stunning photography that transport readers to the city everyone’s talking about.”
Abby Rapoport and Kira Brunner Don
“We are a fairly unique publication,” Abby added. “We’re not like other travel magazines. Our goal is not to tell you what to do, what to see, but really to delve in and present multi-faceted portraits in a time when we felt that so much was caricature. Our goal is to offer a platform for international writers in each location. Our next issue is coming out in two months on the Caribbean Sea available on strangersguide.com. In each of those issues, we’re committed to making sure that at least 50 if not 75 percent of the writers, photographers and storytellers are native to that location because we believe that we need to be hearing more from international writers. We need to be delving deeper into each location and really understanding relationships in the world at a time when that is so sorely lacking. Our website takes a look across an even wider swath of the globe. Our home page is a piece by an amazing Zimbabwean writer on internet access, a piece by Eritrean writer on energy efficiency, a piece by an Asian writer on the shift in Hong Kong from Cantonese to Mandarin, and a piece by a British soldier’s love for a particular village in Iraq. So, we cover a lot of territory and we hope that you’ll find it as engaging and illuminating as we hope it is. So with that, let me turn it over to Kira, who will tell you a little bit more about our Moscow issue.”
“I wanted to talk a little bit about the process of how we put together the print issue,” Kira pointed out. “We do a weekly online mini-magazine or newsletter. The print magazine is four times a year, and each issue is a different place, and we do that deep dive into the place itself. What we really try to do is put together an advisory board for each issue from the country itself that includes academics, novelists, photographers, writers, journalists and artists from the country who then help advise us on the best pieces and people that we should start talking to. And then I go down to the countries, meet with numerous artists and commission the pieces. So, what we’re trying to do is make sure that 50 to 70 percent of all the work in the magazine is newly commissioned work by folks from the countries or cities that we’re covering. Each issue I feel like I make this one connection with one of the advisors who really acts as a co-editor in many ways.”
Pamela Sorensen and Kimball Stroud
“We launched online with Misha’s photo essay,” she explained, “which asks the question: ‘What does Moscow believe in?’ Moscow has undertaken a huge change in the last 20, if not 500, years, which is how you can think about Moscow. Misha did a fantastic photo essay that really carefully and profoundly looked at that issue. It really sucks you in. We also did pieces on Russian rap and hip hop in Moscow with fantastic photographs of club life and performers and the kind of energy that you see there. We have a fiction piece in each issue. We have a new piece of fiction by Laura in this issue, as well.We did a large look at the renovation of Moscow. There’s been huge changes, moving of streets, widening of boulevards, but we didn’t just look at that; we also examined that in conjunction with the way it was imagined by an artistic movement known as the paper architects and how they envisioned this utopian change in Moscow in the 1980s, when such dreams were impossible and what were the visions and what were the reality. So that’s really how we try to approach each issue, seriously thinking about the place. This is a magazine about place, and that’s how we approach it. We’re a travel magazine that approaches travel as seriously taking into consideration what is happening in the places that we go to. So I’ll leave it at that. Drink up.” We did.
