Nawaaz Ahmed’s Radiant Fugitives, a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction, is the story of a family and a country grappling with changing identity. The...
Dear Jinx Allen, I love the pseudonym you chose and wore like a rosary around your neck for protection. But those men on the sidewalk standing around the sewer medallions weren’t under your spell. They fanned...
Mike checked the gauges, and the buncher hissed like it was satisfied with a cruel new law it had just made up. “What would you do out there anyway?” Mike shouted over the earplugs. He motioned at the...
Hello everyone! My name is Kate, I am from Ukraine, and I want to share my story with you now. I was born in Dnipro – it’s a city located in center-east Ukraine. My grandmothers were born in 1939, and...
May we see the day when war and bloodshed cease, when a great peace will embrace the whole world and right now especially Ukraine; when all who live on earth shall realize we have not come into being to drop...
I wake up. Russia will invade soon. I eat my breakfast. Russia will invade soon. I go shopping. Russia will invade soon. I buy buckwheat and chocolate. Russia will invade soon. I take a bus to work. Russia will invade...
VIRUS AND STREAM It was August. The stream ran low but was busy with creatures seeking to cool off. One day a little human stood on the bank, and sneezed, and a virus entered the stream. Stream said, Are you singing...
Refuge for the Displaced Persons —for Ivan & Anastasia Sahaidachny and family 1. The rain tastes charred. My mother calls it ruin rain it leaves streaks of ash on our skin. Somewhere a home is burning, once...
_____ Mark Blickley grew up within walking distance of New York’s Bronx Zoo. He is a proud member of the Dramatists Guild and PEN American Center. His latest book is the flash fiction collection, Hunger...
Yaruslav the Wise holds the city in his hands. Its domes and alleys constructed themselves in a dream of how best to manage the hill above the Dnipro. He has a Tatar face, fur-trimmed hat, robes of an idealized medieval...
The Letter that Could Not Be Sent Dear V: Listen: I would have thought, it being winter right now, that drinking Borscht is better for keeping the soul warm than drinking Kool Aid, but what do I know. I’m just a...
I. Freshman year of college, your professor in ‘Reclaiming Human Rights for Communities of Color’ tells you she teaches her daughter consent through the most basic forms of contact. If someone asks for a hug, she makes...
White Armada pale winter sun glints off raised metallic plastic letters ARMADA on the broad rear of a meticulously white SUV—this whale of a vehicle (already mixed metaphors) has just pulled from a side street...
Lan Samantha Chang’s The Family Chao, released this February by W.W. Norton, on the surface, is a story about a Chinese immigrant family and the death of its patriarch. It is also a portrait of America, its many...
attached to a brutalist construction— I see city blocks that fall asleep amid prickly weeds I see a skein of geese that land on the surface of the lake like it’s their job to surprise on demand _____...
The ash sift settling on our cars and lawn furniture, the towering gray cumulus clouds, the smoke everywhere searing our eyes, throats, burning lungs, choking the shrouded streets, the way the cremated fumes seeped...
