Danielle Steele’s Going Home, Alice Munro’s Dear Life. Richard Bach’s Jonathan Livingston Seagull. Ali flips open a moldy Farsi translation of The Three Musketeers, his eyes landing on “All falsehood is a mask” just as a slip of paper glides down onto the library’s patchy carpet.
(No Place is Foreign/fiction)
When my father measured women in percentages, I learned to chart myself like livestock—head, pelvis, torso. Yet the red horse leaned his warmth into me, the chickadees sang, and the body refused to stay math. Years later, back home, I discover what love weighs when you stop counting.
(fiction)
I am sorry to say this, but what if You made a mistake?
What if You took the wrong kid?
I heard You took two more kids today from Askar’s middle school.
Are the soldiers working for you?
(Palestinian Voices/ fiction)
I would need help to enter, hesitatingly, into my mother’s sick body, to bite into her cancer, twist it every which way, let it melt on my tongue like a communion wafer, pierce it with my teeth and let out all its juice, its pus, lick my fingers. It would definitely taste like something unfamiliar, but I’d continue, that’s how the abscess would burst, how I’d heal my mother, how I’d heal from my mother, it would be enough for me to swallow her whole, she would be in me, and I’d spit her out again to rid myself of her.
(fiction)
“An eleven-year-old girl sees something no child should—and keeps her silence. In a world of broken promises and simmering class tension, what she witnesses becomes a secret weapon in a household on the brink.”
(fiction/No Place is Foreign)
“See, that’s the thing, my little ningning.” He booped my nose and grinned even more. “It doesn’t always have to end with death. Minsan, the greatest sacrifices come from living.
(No Place is Foreign/fiction)
I’ve never thought of myself as someone with a scar, but in this portrait, the damage from a dog bite is clearly visible next to my nose. A dent, a scratch, and a bump, a kind of trinity.
(fiction)
The world seems full of mystery, her best friend seems an exquisite one, and makes her feel as though, at forty-six, while life is often mundane and monotonous, full of the known and expected, somehow, you could find yourself emerging from an inflatable vagina, really, that’s what this thing was, in a haunted house in the middle of Iowa.
(fiction)
You cannot remember your very first bed, yet its quality defines the rest, because the slats of milk-tasting slumber, though they may bend, buckle, and widen with time, never disappear.
(No Place is Foreign)
The room dark and emptied now, Elisha sits alone in the first row looking up at the piano he’s filled with ghosts.
(fiction)
This is the first in our Palestinian Voices series, featuring work by Palestinian writers and artists, including people who are part of the Palestinian diaspora.
The dignified broadcaster on TV smiled. “The boy’s mouth is now a restricted military zone,” he announced.
(Palestinian Voices/ Translations)
I wasn’t blameless. I’d slammed doors, I’d yelled. One time, I threw a plate against the wall and it shattered. But when someone hits you, you leave. That’s what you do, even if no one else loves you but your cat.
(fiction)
Part of our series of pieces inspired by the Democratic Party’s 2024 platform.
“We can recite the Preamble here,” my mother said.
“Who would hear us?” I asked.
“We can say it to the sky.”
(fiction)
Part of our series of pieces inspired by the Democratic Party’s 2024 platform.
Her father had always believed in fairness, in giving people a hand up instead of—or maybe in addition to—a handout, in the kind of society where the strong should lift up the weak.
(fiction)
This is the first in our series of pieces inspired by the Democratic Party’s 2024 platform.
Unhappy with the garbage they were given, here they all came to exchange it for different garbage, and to perfume the warm December air with exhaust.
(fiction)
They stand in silence for a few minutes. Then his mother, in a whisper, exhales “shaman,” elongating the last syllable as if blowing cigarette smoke into the air.
(fiction)
On the last page of Eveline’s printed homicide story, she has scribbled, “The story might not follow the rules, but I got your attention, didn’t I? You’ll always remember me.”
In the morning, you paced the sand like you were trying to find stable ground. “I am in control,” I thought I heard you say. You did a meticulous job of packing up our tent.
(fiction)
Medellín is a dreamscape. It’s a parlor show best accompanied with multiple soundtracks. It’s part paradise, it’s part fevered hell, it’s all forms salvation.
(fiction)
The latest in our FORTHCOMING series of excerpts from new and recent books:
Our Holocaust education had gone beyond the bounds of institutional sanction. We were now in uncharted waters.
(fiction)
He is free, Bexley thought, free enough to float on that breeze, rise and soar with seagulls if he wanted to.
(fiction)
It’s in these moments that Hobbs Hesler subtly presents space for the reader to ponder the lessons we learn at any age, picking apart notions that we should get second chances.
(reviews)
My mother was certain my brother had planned his own death, but she wasn’t sure how he did it.
He wonders if his life has been a lie. Was he ever really a selenophile? Were the yearly parades a waste of time? The protests. The fights for equality.
(fiction)
Sudden understanding has snapped me from her side like a branch from a tree in strong wind.
(fiction)
Back then, protecting the border was about preventing people from getting out; now it means not letting anyone in…
(fiction)
The synagogue of my youth wandered throughout the city, from the basement of the Methodist church on the Manayunk hills to the East Falls nursing home…
The latest in our FORTHCOMING series of excerpts from new books
“She washed her hair and chose the most suitable clothes her closet would allow, the kind of outfit she imagined the woman who headed up the office of human resources would want to see.”
(fiction)
The latest in our FORTHCOMING series of excerpts from new books
“But when Flora dried off, put on her housecoat and entered the bedroom, she was not prepared for what she saw.”
(fiction)
I held my magazines in my lap and looked longingly out the window, believing myself to be a melancholic character in the movie of my life.
(fiction)
Another Chicago Magazine 