From the editor.

• Author: Kiernan, James Patrick

Click a shutter, write a novel, even shoot a rocket. These are all ways to tell stories, really. By doing so, we create new borders of our own, and challenge accepted norms of understanding. In this issue, Argentine photographer Marcos Zimmermann talks with Joshua Goodman about his countrymen's long-held obsession with an urban ideal, and in images delicate and haunting, shows us what lies beyond the glitter of Buenos Aires. Also fascinated by the great beyond, scientists in Alaska, Alex Gillis tells us, are shooting rockets into the aurora borealis to pry loose some of its secrets.

As Louis Werner explains, Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719), considered the first novel in the English language, was a story well known by Defoe's readership before he committed quill pen to paper. A social and political critic of his times, Defoe took a castaway's saga and unwittingly created a template for many future plays, movies, novels, and even television scripts. Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, the father of Brazilian literature, was also a social critic, David Taylor tells us, who so freed the novel from nineteenth-century conventions that a new readership today finds him unfailingly modern. But whereas these writers successfully...