His new novel, A Nearby Country Called Love, offers tenderness, nuance, and surprise in Iran.

Somewhere on another continent, in a city far away, on the twenty-fourth of January, a clock chimed at midnight, indicating we had run out of time.

There were limits to what you were willing to dare with a body that, by some weird alchemical feat of skin and blood, you shared with your mother.

This is loss. Memory, damp and compact as clods of earth, is dried out in the marketplace and burned as turf.

“I heard you in the other room asking your mother, ‘Mama, am I a Palestinian?’ When she answered ‘Yes’ a heavy silence fell on the whole house. It was as if something hanging over our heads had fallen, its noise exploding, then—silence.” —Ghassan Kan

My parents, who lived and studied in New York in the 1970s, were part of an elite group of Zimbabweans and Africans who were able to escape their nations’ protracted liberation wars and pursue knowledge abroad. Along the way, many of them acquired so

It had been sixty years since Mommy Mae left Tchula, Mississippi for Chicago, and she still believed that education was a salve for the systemically bruised. I wasn’t as sure, but journeyed to Iowa City on the fuel of her faith.

Recently, I came across a new book that collects and translates hundreds of Kirundi proverbs. It’s the work of Lionel Kubwimana, and it brings treasures from the language of Burundi to speakers of English and French — and to speakers of Kirundi outsi

They couldn’t call me a Jap when I was wearing a Girl Scout uniform. It was too American. It was like a shield.

the trains are busy with bodies. There’s an ass in every seat, hands on every inch of railing and small acts of consideration are now optional, says the poster by the sliding doors. I keep my face covered among the commuters which means my feelings a

When Wiktor dumps the first shovelful, the dirt falls on Michał’s stomach. Then more dirt flies, which reminds Michał of both his vacation at the seaside — he tossed sand on his dad, who was dazed by the beer and the bill for fried cod — and all the

Someone in a machine moves snow in the courtyard; otherwise, the unenforced silence feels like the last institutional luxury. I think of summer as a bombardment or as a series of advertisements. I partake, order from the website, eat and eat and am i

No one is likely to shame you for not having read Dracula, the way they do The Mill on the Floss or Middlemarch, though perhaps they should and perhaps that is, ever so subtly, what I am up to now. I was once the sort of person who thought they knew

I thought fondly of the comics and sketchbooks that had kept me sane and alive during my stifled childhood. I wouldn’t exchange them for this palace.

Here he was, getting ahead of himself as usual. Mummy looked as if she could slip away tonight.

In 1988 our fledgling nation drowned again in blood and clamshell clanging, oh how holy the flesh on pagoda stairs

I’d hold my breath and keep still, resolved to treat the voices the way I would any bully. If they fed on my attention, I would starve them.

Alexander Chee’s essay, taken from a new edition of Dracula in bookstores this week, takes the myth and the monster more seriously than, surely, many of us have. Among his considerations, he writes, were “the many ways we can write about evil, as it

In your first memory of him, you are four years old, and you are being suffocated. You are under a blanket, having a pretend tea party with your best friend. She is his daughter and she is also four years old. The blanket is pale purple, made of worn

I nearly decided to begin writing this piece with a list of circumstances: those which led my writing of this piece, those which led to publishing it, and those which led to reading your book in the first place. I quickly realized it would become a l

They say we are sinking, but the sea has spat out the bones of our villages a thousand and one times.

Jaime had hesitated with the birds, afraid to use them in a ritual, afraid of what they might return to him.

My enthusiasm for pockets has never failed to surprise the men who overhear it. They respond as if it is I, not the pocket, who is unusual. A pocket, they seem to think. So pedestrian. A pocket! they seem to think. My good God, the things that get wo

In photography class, you had learned to control your breathing, to narrow your focus and attention and direct it at one external object outside of you.

This month, we parse bodies — or, perhaps more accurately, some considerations of being bodied, of what is read of bodies’ clothes, of what is read from bodies, raw. This being Guernica, the sum of our offering is contradiction. Ellie Eberlee seeks i

In the years that formed me, I poured myself into classes, hobbies, extracurriculars I was told you’d like: Latin, Mandarin, Multivariable Calculus, Swimming, AP Physics.

After the Great Wall of China, the second-longest wall in the world is in the Sahara. Around the 1,700-mile sand-and-stone wall runs a belt of more than 10 million landmines, believed to make up one of the densest minefields in the world. It cleaves

It is evening, the last weekend in August, and I am trying to remember what it is like to wear shorts. Sundresses and bathing suits too. I sit on the granite-studded shores of Lake Wahwashkesh in northern Ontario, stretched atop the gray wooden dock

There must be as many works of art on the horrors humanity has endured as there are horrors. More, one might think, but our ever-evolving human history suggests otherwise — or, rather, a certain practice of that discipline, which excavates ever-deepe

In exchange for a profit of two hundred rupees, Kesu-mama decides to marry off his orphaned niece to a wealthy businessman thrice her age. The devastated young girl’s protests are met with traditional pressure to succumb to a fate decided by those wh