You Arab?
“As we waited at the airport in Vienna for a connecting flight, a Middle Eastern woman walked up to Anil and asked him, ‘You Arab?'”
Suripya Bhatnagar discusses prejudice and her desire to live in a more tolerant world.
narrative nonfiction
Twenty Questions
“I press my forehead against the cold glass as the bus moves onward, the sliver of land between highways, the dogs, it all collapses into nothing.” Elena Robidoux writes of disillusionment in Peru.
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The Fall: How Not To Survive Your Father’s Imprisonment
“…Why one relative wouldn’t look in another one’s eyes, these never qualified as bedtime tales, or as I grew older, any-time tales.” Soniah Kamal talks of growing up in modern Pakistan and 9/11.
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Empty Houses
“Cemeteries keep company with cities like trails of smoke…Like an actual city, the public cemetery is made up of twelve neighbourhoods, including the areas where the Chinese (including my great-grandfather) and Jews were once buried.” Kevin Chong meditates on his father’s death in Canada.
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Calling Bhutan’s Fire Department to Save a Cat from a Roof Got Pretty Weird
“Periodically, I heard this cat in the distance, doing something I call meowling — a cross between meowing and howling.” Sarah Lyn Rogers recounts saving a cat from a roof in Bhutan.
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Unconditional Surrender: April 30, 1975
“I’d like to find out where the one-way ticket goes, though. China has Taiwan and Korea has South Korea. Where will we go? To some tiny island somewhere? Wherever it is will be freedom.” Michelle Robin La shares the first person account of her husband’s experience as a child in the Vietnam on April 30th, 1975.
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On Monsters
“This made me reassess everything that I thought I had known about him, and to an extent what I thought I had known about myself.” Deonte Osayande looks at what happens when a childhood friend becomes a murderer.
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Caught Between Kentucky and Her Mind
““Who do you think took them?†I ask and lean in towards her. She assures me that theft played no role in it, because to say so would implicate Augustana, a Christian institution, in allowing sin to occur on its watch.” Inna Viktorovna makes a strange connection with a 98-year-old woman.
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The Mansion in Grapevine Canyon
“Walter was born in Cynthiana, Kentucky to George and Anna Scott. Pa George’s interests focused mainly on two enterprises: making moonshine and raising trotting horses. ” Wayne Sefton recounts the strange history of an abandoned mansion in the Mojave Desert.
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A Buddy Old and New
“Doorbells rouse excitement in the haves, while the have nots grumble at the disturbance.” Vincent J. Fitzgerald tells a simple story of a surprising friendship struck up during a routine social work visit.
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