My sister Zoe, a travel writer, had just returned to New York City from Tel-Aviv or Riga or St. Petersburg when somebody told her I had three months left to live. The news struck Zoe as rather odd: nobody at the headquarters of the travel publishing firm where we both work could trace the source of this information or venture a guess as to the cause of my impending death, and Zoe is not the one to believe uncorroborated rumors. She brushed the idea aside, and proceeded doing business as usual: finished her report on the latest adventure, ordered new custom luggage from Signe Mou on Fifth Avenue, and went out for lunch with her boss, our chief editor Karen Everest. Karen is Zoe’s boss only nominally; in fact, Zoe herself hired and trained Karen during her own brief stint as the chief at Kongo-Roo.

The job kept her stationed in New York for several months at a time—it was the longest period of time Zoe had spent in one place since college, and she almost single-handedly caused the demise of this 100-year old organization driving everybody crazy with her constant flow of ideas for radical change. It was she who opened our surprisingly successful West Coast office (hiring me as a technical editor), and immediately attempted to do the same in China and Ireland, I think. When those ventures almost bankrupted the company, Zoe announced that she was a travel writer at heart and turned her position over to Karen. They say that after two and a half years of tenure my sister’s office had remained a bare white-walled room without a single picture or personal item.

 

Silent Signs features a painting by Gay Degani.  Read the rest here.  Read more about Olga Zilberbourg and Gay Degani.  You can also click here to read another story by Olga in The Writer’s Eye magazine.

For those of you who have been waiting to get your hands on a copy of the latest issue of Faraway, today is the day!  Copies still warm from the presses are now on display at Second Story Books of Claremont, California.  In the coming days there will also be copies in Borders Bookstore in Montclair, California, and in Needlesandpins Records of Pomona.  Now you can read all one hundred splendid pages without burning your retinas off looking at a computer screen.

Allow me also to take this opportunity to plug Second Story Books of Claremont, which has been one of our staunchest supporters.  They’ve got a great selection of new, used, rare, hard-to-find and interesting titles to choose from.  More importantly, they are one of a rare breed of independent bookstores.  If you’re tired of going into Barnes and Nobles and seeing a million copies of the latest James Patterson or Dean Koontz book, stop by Second Story.  More importantly still, the proprietors of Second Story support writers and artists like those who contribute to and publish Faraway.

So stop in to pick up the latest copy of our journal and browse around for a book to read afterwards.  And don’t forget to let us know what you think!

If not, what are you waiting for?!  This issue contains work by over thirty contributors from all around the world.  The content and the layout are the best Faraway has seen in its two year publication history.  Download it now by right-clicking the image, and clicking “Save Target As” (2.85 megabytes).  And don’t forget to click the comments form below, and let us know what you think!

I’ve also updated the Marathon page with an account of today’s run.