(Patricia Chu, Photo by Lee B. Ewing) “When We Look, We See Each Other”:Thoughts on Asian American Literature in the Twenty-First Century First, thanks to Lawrence Minh-Bui Davis, Caroline Hong, and Mai-Linh Hong for arranging this gathering and permitting me to take part. For Min, I’m delighted to be here with you . . .
Read More
The differences between the two men’s backgrounds could hardly be greater: one was born in 1940, black, the son of sharecroppers, in a small town in Alabama. By the age of six, he had seen only two white people. The other was born in 1946, white, in New York City, the son . . .
Read More
When does a cemetery become a field again? I stood before the shared gravestone of my great-great-grandparents and knew about them only what I’d learned that day. He was a minister and farmer, she a midwife who delivered babies around the turn of the last century for five dollars per live birth. . . .
Read More
In a burst of concentration, I succeeded in catching the hen and stood withit in my hands. Strangely, it didn’t really feel alive:stiff, dry, an old whitefeather-riddled woman’s hat that shrieked out truths from 1912. Thunderhung in the air. A scent rose up from the fence boards, like when you opena photo . . .
Read More
Photo: Kancelaria Sejmu/Łukasz Błasikiewicz / CC BY At a time when unidentifiable government-paid thugs are abducting people into unmarked vans off the streets of Portland, it might take extra effort to notice and recognize the brutality of police states outside the U.S. Especially when the news comes from a country whose government has . . .
Read More
Mrs. Ebelmayer had not seen the world. She had spent her childhood and youth in a pleasant, roomy house in the suburbs of a large city and , once married, had outgrown the early stages of her life in a house very similar to her first, in another suburb of the same . . .
Read More
It is Friday, August 7th, and I just finished reading in the New York Times the major, generous, and informative obituary of Eric Bentley, written largely by the late editor of the Times Book Review Christopher Lehmann-Haupt. It was deeply moving to me. For more than sixty years I knew Bentley and much of his major . . .
Read More
My grandfather Franjo Rejc lived his life in Bosnia. As a high-ranking railroad official, he moved from station to station until, several months before the outbreak of World War II, he arrived in Sarajevo to work at the main headquarters with the title of chief railway inspector. When I first wrote about . . .
Read More
The Massachusetts Review first featured the work of interdisciplnary artist Panteha Abareshi in Summer 2018 (volume 59. issue 2), when she was 18. I have been keeping an eye on her amazing progress. Such strong work across disciplines. Here is how Panteha introduces herself on her website: “My name is Panteha Abareshi, . . .
Read More
All day the sun moved over the rock I sat on.All day I tried to think like an elk.I’d been drinking bad winefrom a thermos and counting the bladeson little bluestem. It was nearly darkwhen they finally appeared under the gnarled oak,brown legs in prairie grass. And there’s the bull——from “Ghost Child,” . . .
Read More