I tried to envision walking down old cobblestone streets, but my memories drowned in darkness: My brain clasped shut. The doors that were so hard to close when I was leaving twenty-two years ago were even harder to reopen now. But I had to. I had to go back and face the ghosts and the memories. Had to shine a light into all corners of the old dark closet. I was planning a trip to visit my mother in Russia, and as the trip got closer, I decided I was ready to go home. I tacked on a few days in Kharkiv.
(nonfiction/Dispatches from Ukraine)
Tag: Nonfiction
Shulman’s collection guides readers through the ideological formation of American Jewish children, teenagers, and young adults, showing how they are carefully acculturated to conflate Judaism with Zionism—a fusion designed to keep dollars and political will flowing toward Israel, no matter how ferociously it attacks or constrains the people who also occupied the land now called Israel before 1948.
(reviews)
This is piece is a part of our Palestinian Voices series, featuring work by Palestinian writers and artists, including people who are part of the Palestinian diaspora.
It’s like they learned where Gaza is or finally understood that a Gazan outside of Gaza, one that sees adulthood, is rare.
(nonfiction/Palestinian Voices)
The latest in our FORTHCOMING series of excerpts from new and recent books:
No wonder Mr. Barde is struggling to fall asleep, considering his job where hypertension goes without saying. So, he suffers patiently, reads until impossible hours, and sometimes plays at cultivating insomnia, gaining thus beaches of meditation, wanderings in thought fostered by silence.
(translations)
I wish I’d thought to shove my friend L. off his drum throne, sit in his place, and try my hand at the kit. But in my defense, this was high school in the 1970s, when teenaged girls didn’t play drums.
(nonfiction)
Inside the mountain of smoke were orange, flickering circles like tornado funnels. And they were bearing south at what was clearly a tremendous speed. This was the Palisades Fire, the worst urban firestorm in a century.
(nonfiction)
Part of our series of pieces inspired by the Democratic Party’s 2024 platform.
Children cough, wheeze, inhale the gas, and rub burning eyes in the capital city through January. Inhalers are in demand. The government talks about creating artificial rain to clear up the sky.
(nonfiction)
That’s the thing about addiction. It hides in plain sight, promising to quit. At first it itches, and then it hurts a little, but then it just becomes who you are.
(nonfiction)
The third place winner of ACM’s second nonfiction contest, and part of our series of pieces inspired by the Democratic Party’s 2024 platform.
This woman, with her light touch, the woman at the clinic who held my hand during the procedure, the clinic staff, and the women who shared their stories, have given me something I seldom encountered before in life—kindness without expectation or judgment.
The winner of ACM’s second nonfiction contest:
Another way to think about a porch: as a threshold – a space one passes through on their way somewhere else, a waiting place, between in and out.
