A Review of Aria Aber’s Good Girl (Hogarth 2025) “I wanted to take pictures, I thought, because exile made my parents’ lives a mystery to me. I wanted to archive my life, to have irrefutable testimony,” says Nila, the protagonist of Aria Aber’s debut novel, Good Girl. Good Girl tracks the artistic . . .
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Photo credit: Oxford Union In my final week as President of the Oxford Union, former Scottish First Minister Humza Yousaf – the first Muslim to hold the office – began his address in the House Chamber to me with these words: “You’ve not had the easiest time as president, and I’m saying . . .
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Deported Venezuelan soccer player, Jerce Reyes Barrios with his older daughter Carla and baby Isabella. (All photos courtesy of his family) On a recent evening, I sat in the San Diego office of immigration attorney Linette Tobin. Her two- year-old pug, Cujo, played at our feet. I waited for her to make a FaceTime . . .
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Photo Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons/SWinxy. This letter was dictated by Mahmoud Khalil from ICE Detention in Louisiana to his lawyer over the phone. My name is Mahmoud Khalil and I am a political prisoner. I am writing to you from a detention facility in Louisiana where I wake to cold mornings and . . .
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The woman who was once caught by the air raid siren while she was taking a bath was most afraid of dying like that—without her panties, naked, with wet hair and hairy legs; afraid that the first responders who would pull her from the rubble would see her white body with . . .
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My father died in a car accident in a blizzard when I was nine. The next winter, my mother took my brothers and I to the Baja, where we camped on the beach for a month or so. My fifth-grade teacher tasked me with keeping a journal while I was gone.
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A Review of Joseph Fasano’s The Last Song of the World (BOA Editions, 2024) Like a deep breath, like a flower that blooms against the relentless elements of an inhospitable season, Joseph Fasano’s The Last Song of the World begins with “Sudden Hymn in Winter,” a short but powerful poem, functioning almost as the collection’s own . . .
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This morning, something in my doubt dissolves.The footprint or the transparency of floors.The wells open up. Sometimes, the wells close again.The added materials haven’t allowed the decision anything.Footsteps must swell, take up bone. The wells must rise.—from Marissa Davis’ translation of Stéphanie Ferrat’s “Skyside” Volume 65, Issue 3 (Fall 2024) Tell us . . .
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Are you in a beer slump, do you steerClear of tastes unlike those you hold dear?Well, I have a solution:New Beers Resolutions!I tried it; there’s nothing to fear. 1.If you like a clean lager (no frills),Here’s a beer that might just fit your bill:For Rebellion Red LagerHas a touch of swaggerWith sweetness . . .
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There is an old joke I heard one winter,one popular among the farmersfrom Trøndelag to Nord-Norge: two deer run along the railroad.One says to the other, we have to get offthese tracks and into the forest.—from Michael Lee’s “Norway’s Iron Road,” Volume 65, Issue 2 (Summer 2024) Tell us about one of the . . .
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