“I secure my head scarf and get out of the car. My driver, Latif, is with me; women don’t drive here. Months ago, when Latif met me at the airport, I told him I came to Kabul to teach English. His eyes brightened and his eyebrows lifted, ‘Ah, my granddaughter wants to . . .
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“My brother Terrence came by to see me the night I came home. He asked me about Grandma’s funeral, about the food and the weather, about who would take over her house and her dogs, if I found any pictures of us as children there, if I would ever go back.” —from . . .
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The 2017 Winner of the Anne Halley Poetry Prize is Gary J. Whitehead, for his poem, “Music from a Farther Room,” published in Volume 57, Issue 4. Gary J. Whitehead is a poet, teacher, and crossword constructor. His third collection of poems, A Glossary of Chickens, was published by Princeton University Press in 2013. His . . .
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A review of Uncertain Glory by Joan Sales, translated by Peter Bush (NYRB Classics, 2017) Joan Sales’s Incerta glòria is a novel about precariousness. Its account of the Spanish Civil War, refracted in the experience of various characters living in Barcelona and on the Aragonese front in 1937 and 1938, draws its power and beauty . . .
Read MoreIn my spy fiction class at the University of Massachusetts, we had been reading John le Carré’s The Spy Who Came In From The Cold. One of the key figures in that novel is a high-level East German spy named Hans-Dieter Mundt, the ostensible target of a complex MI6 operation to eliminate him. . . .
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“I sipped my ice water like a martyr. The ballast to all of it, of course—the thing that kept me from contentment—was envy. I was jealous of everybody, for everything. I was jealous of the couple for their house, their jobs, their drinks, each other. I was jealous of Bors for his . . .
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(photo from Center on Budget and Policy Priorities) They don’t seem to care about truth in anything else, but Republican legislators should consider a forthright and honest name for their “tax reform package.” Senators passed their enormous tax cut for corporations and the wealthy in the wee hours of a Friday night, after House . . .
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You fuss in the hospitalbed one vein sharpacross your foreheadis a rill. . . .—from “What Color”, Fall 2017 (Volume 58, Issue 3) Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.I’ve been writing for as long as I can remember—I remember writing a poem about the sun when I was . . .
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“Her father handed her to us. “No kiss,” he said, a few times. “No touch.” The diminutive old man, bent from hard work, gave his daughter a stern look that I couldn’t quite decipher except that it made me vaguely uncomfortable. However, the promise of no kissing was easy to give. “No kissing and . . .
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