Translated from Spanish by Maureen ShaughnessyPublished by Charco Press, 2024, 188 pages. Original version published in 2021. “So then, why did you come back every summer? Do you like to suffer? Why didn’t you just stay home? There, in Buenos Aires, dying of heat. Ah. No. That’s right—it’s because you couldn’t. You didn’t have anyone …
Continue reading Why Did You Come Back Every Summer: Belén López Peiró
Published by Catapult, 2020, 218 pages “We continue to slip in and out of society like ghosts in the night, connecting our hearts and minds with the land and the many tribal peoples who cross our paths every single day, carrying the heavy thread of the prayers of hundreds of individuals. We run through landscapes …
Continue reading Spirit Run—A 6,000-Mile Marathon Through North America’s Stolen Land: Noé Álvarez
Published by Sort Of Books, 1999, 247 pages. In 1988, Chris Stewart and his wife Ana bought an old, remote farm in Las Alpujarras in the Sierra Nevada foothills of Andalucía. This is the first book in his trilogy about living on their farm, El Valero. Chris, a former Genesis drummer, doesn’t pretend that living …
Continue reading Driving Over Lemons—An Optimist in Andalucía: Chris Stewart
Published by Orient BlackSwan, 2023, 148 pages. “Abid Hasan Safrani...was a quiet revolutionary who kept himself out of the limelight even while being present at every vital scene and moment of the final phase of our freedom struggle...”—Sugata Bose, Foreword First of all, full disclosure: Ismat Mehdi is my aunt. So this book is personal …
Published by HarperOne / Coronet, 2022, 293 pages. “Everybody has secrets. Everybody. I guess the difference is that we either die with them and let them eat us up, or we put them out there, wrestle with them (or they wrestle with us) until we . . . reconcile. Secrets are what swallow us.” In …
Published by Tin Gate, 2023, 469 pages. Sometimes so-called ordinary people lead extraordinary lives. The two people at the centre of this memoir are among these: Robert W. Norris and his mother, Kay Murphy Schlinkman. Norris writes about his life, weaving it with his mother’s, someone who influenced him deeply and with whom he formed …
Published by Top Shelf, 2019, 208 pages. After the attack on Pearl Harbour by the Japanese on 7 December 1941, the US government declared that all people of Japanese origin were “enemy aliens”, including those who were US citizens. They were rounded up and incarcerated. The assumption was that their race made them “nonassimilable” and …
Published by Beating Windward Press, 2014, 178 pages. “My life was a deconstructed text, and I was surrounded by words—their sustaining luxuries and dangers. Words have power; you never know what may come of them. Take this: I want to leave—the rest is a jigsaw of memory taking up space in my head. I want …
Published by folio, 2008, 254 pages. Published in English as The Years, Seven Stories Press, 2017. Translated from French by Alison L. Strayer. “All the images will disappear. ...“—all the twilight images of the early years, the pools of light from a summer Sunday, images from dreams in which the dead parents come back to …
Published by Vintage, 2005, 228 pages. “My past, or lack of it, had caught up with me. I’d been bogged down in the same place for too long, trapped by habits and memories. I was clotted with rootedness. And in the end I’d fallen ill and run out of words. My Irish grandfather, a day-worker …
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