|
An ornamental pavilion; a garden folly; a structure for the sale of newspapers and other periodicals: These are the various definitions of the name of our publication.
It is our hope that what you read in the virtual pages of this magazine will bring to mind the many layers of meaning of this storied term, a word of Turkish or Persian origin whose first use in English reaches back to the seventeenth century.
I would also hope the name conjures a sense of the private thrill of approaching a newspaper kiosk full to the rafters with periodicals in many languages and with different points of view, featuring reports both familiar and obscure.
KIOSK will privilege the small story over the grand, and will showcase the modest narratives of the everyday. These are the life narratives that allow us, as Joan Didion once famously said of her notebook, to remember what it was for someone to be who they were then, to remember what it was like for them.
In this issue we read Eva Vieyra-McDaniel's compelling profile of dominatrix Mistress Victoria, and Travis Lau's unorthodox food story about hunting wild boar in California. With Tallin Aghourian we follow a family back to Nairobi after a quarter century of exile, while Paul Gackle takes us through the grueling trial of an Olympic hopeful falsely accused of doping.
While many of these stories are local, they bring their readers into the complex inner worlds of their subjects, worlds that for many of us could not be more distant than if we had to travel there by plane. This is a collection of oddities and wonders -- just the kind of thing you might find in an out-of-the-way newsstand in a city you've never been to before.
Patricia Pierson
December 2007
 |
