For my brother Ahsan, whose name means “an act of kindness” and for my sister Salina, whose name means, “to bring peace” My voice is gone. It leaves me as I stand on a street corner, waiting for a moment to wade across a road awash in the Calcutta monsoon wilderness. The water is up […]
Essays
From Lost to Loved in Bihar
Letter to Laurena
by Hannah Dela Cruz Abramsa
Prima, when you called me, the trees were lit up with Christmas lights in the town where I lived, and the air was cold and smelled sour along the black river. I had happened earlier down the empty streets, my footsteps ringing out—that rapid, low-heeled sound of a woman walking alone. I stopped twice in […]
NOTES TOWARD A GENREFICATION OF LITERARY FICTION by Claire Harlan Orsi
The romantic strain—the idea that individuals emanate unique works of art unconstrained by societal or intellectual strictures—is as potent as ever in contemporary thinking and teaching about writing. Nowhere is this more evident than in the relationship of literary fiction to genre fiction, a category that literary writers tend to deplore. Take a few sample […]
32, BLUE by Michael Barach
32 Blue . . . In the backyard I say hike, drop two steps back, and wait with my elbow cocked and the youth football our father bought us for Hanukkah grazing my ear. In school I held a conch shell that echoed ocean sounds in its spiral corridor, and in the football I listen […]
REQUIEM by Cindy M. Carter
The first bullet makes a brand new hole in a history vermilion. Potholes, bullet holes, dark stains upon the paving stones. Months from now, all this will be replaced. Heads, arms, legs, trunks, tanks, guns, bitumen and bicycles. One long row of cycles crashes to the ground. It will be some time before the corpses […]
HEGEL SPOKEN HERE or Why Germans Just Love to Tell You How Bad They’ve Been: a travel essay by David Kirby, with photos by Barbara Hamby
A New York friend was yanked to the ground not long ago by her Cairn terrier Henry and broke her wrist. That wouldn’t happen here in Berlin—well, it might, but it seems less likely, given the exemplary behavior of that city’s canines. Can a culture really be judged by the comportment of its dogs? On […]
