Borderlands

Globalization hasn’t killed borders; it’s made them more interesting. We commissioned three leading writers to travel the world’s most impenetrable fault lines, the global gray zones where countries and people — and our often flawed ideas about them — meet. And this year FP and the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting is publishing ebooks with stories from these critical frontiers, starting with Peter Chilson’s We Never Knew Exactly Where: Dispatches From the Lost Country of Mali and Matthieu Aikins’s Bird of Chaman, Flower of the Khyber: Riding Shotgun From Karachi to Kabul in a Pakistani Truck.

You can also read excerpts from the books in our January/February issue below to follow the surprises these writers found, from the coup that awaited Chilson in Mali, once an African model of democracy, to Matthieu Aikins’s wild, smoke-filled journey over the Hindu Kush in a Pakistani truck. And we begin and end with Louie Palu’s powerful photography from the U.S.-Mexico border as you’ve never seen it before — all with an introduction by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Paul Salopek, just as he sets off on his own seven-year journey tracing early humans’ first cross-border trek.

EBOOKS

• We Never Knew Exactly Where
  By Peter Chilson

• Bird of Chaman, Flower of the Khyber
  By Matthieu Aikins

EXCERPTS

• Edge of the World
  By Paul Salopek

• Rebel Country
  By Peter Chilson

• The War Before the Last War
  By Graeme Wood

• Stowaway
  By Matthieu Aikins

• La Frontera
  By Louie Palu