As we work to bring light to the often ignored voices in literature, we must take this week to focus on a specific minority – Afghan women. Nadia Hashimi, a pediatrician of Afghan heritage, tells a fictional but absolutely realistic story of a mother accused of murdering her husband. Set in Hashimi’s parents’ homeland, A …
Americans live in a country of post-slavery, post-Civil War, post-“this water fountain is for whites only.” But we are not post-racism. Wilcox County High School in Georgia held separate “white proms” and “black proms” up until only two years ago, when the school hosted it’s first integrated prom in 2014. There are the cases of …
Dave Eggers is the founder of McSweeney’s, co-founder of 826 Valencia, and an all-around awesome writer, publisher, and philanthropist. His latest novel, Heroes of the Frontier, comes out July 26 courtesy of Knopf Publishing Group. Read an excerpt at Outside magazine. Find Heroes of the Frontier at your favorite bookstore, IndieBound, Barnes and Noble, or …
The desire to escape grounds itself in many of us, but it laid roots early in Andrew Solomon. As a Jewish child hearing stories of the Holocaust and obsessing over British fairy tales, Solomon prepared for his opportunity to get out. In his essay “Dispatches from Everywhere,” Solomon writes: I was afraid of the world. …
Partition essentially means division. In 1947, the Partition of India meant the division between India and Pakistan, the creation of a borderline. But it also meant the division between mother and child, duty and love, youth and battle scars. The 1947 partition was arguably the product of genocide and the motivator of the world’s largest …
I swung between rage and guilt. It was my work that had caused this to happen to my husband. And yet was it not Javad who had betrayed me? But I was not in his shoes, isolated, away from my wife and daughters, vulnerable. I thought of telling him that he was not alone. That …
When you think Fight Club, you think Tyler Durden. When you think Catcher in the Rye, you think Holden Caulfield. Memorable books simply have memorable characters—the ones so complex that you lose your mind right along with them. And by the end of the book you have married Holden and gone to Tyler’s funeral (before you realize …
Other places offer a privacy to our own lives. We travel and keep ourselves estranged against a backdrop of cement and glass. Published last Tuesday, February 16th, Sara Majka’s debut short story collection, Cities I’ve Never Lived In, is a lyric meditation—echoing James Salter and Marguerite Duras—on our connections to places and people, how, says Kelly Link, “people love and …
“We came to the city because we wished to live haphazardly, to reach for only the least realistic of our desires, and to see if we could not learn what our failures had to teach, and not, when we came to live, discover that we had never died.” This week’s New Day Tuesday captures the …
This week’s New Day Tuesday release, Amy Gustine’s You Should Pity Us Instead, is a compilation of short stories being recognized as a “dazzling debut collection” by Publisher’s Weekly. The stories include an assortment of ordinary situations: a women with fifty-five cats, a father on his way to sort out his dead daughter’s apartment, a mother …