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For readers

of Terra nova

The history of Antarctic exploration features extraordinary photographic records. Expedition photographers like Shackleton's Francis Hurley and Scott's Herbert Ponting made the most of the continent's stark tones. Here's just a small sample of photographs from Scott's 1910-1913 expedition.

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At the same time when Scott was exploring Antarctica, the suffrage movement was fighting for women's right to vote, back in London. In these few photos from the movement, you can see what extremes the women went through, fighting not at the end of the earth, but right at home.

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In Terra Nova, Viola devises a photography project working with the hunger strikers of the suffrage movement, to turn classic paintings of the female nude into images of women's power. Here are some of the paintings she attempts to undermine with her photographs.

Antarctica, Suffrage, and More

For Readers

of the Clover House

Click here for the Reader's Guide from the Random House Reader's Circle

Patras and Memory: How I Chose the Setting for The Clover House

Patras, Greece, is not the kind of city people choose to go to. Its architecture is dominated by boxy apartment buildings; its streets form a maze of one-way routes seemingly designed to prevent motion; its colonnaded sidewalks are rendered impassable by serried ranks of parked motorcycles. People transit through Patras, catching the ferry that will take them to Brindisi or Ancona or the Ionian Islands, or the train or bus that will take them to Athens. Patras is secondary to these other places, a placeholder, really. Just somewhere you have to sit for a few hours while you wait to leave.

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But if you look closely, past the satellite dishes and the antennas and the graceless apartment buildings of rebar and cement, you can see the city it used to be before the war, with its neoclassical . . .[read more]

Inspirations

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