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Blood Ritual
Detail from Peter Paul Rubens’s St Sebastian via Wikimedia Commons The white, burnished body of St. Sebastian, bound to a tree and riddled with arrows. He was startling to look at: sinewy, tightly...
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Spring Without Flowers
Mohan Karki observing the spring festival at his home near Mukteshwar in April 2023. Photo by Gurmeet Sapal. In Mukteshwar, a village perched 2,200 meters above sea level in the Indian Himalayas,...
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From Thus Spoke n’t
Original art by Fi Jae Lee Aerok Fiction Factory There once was a country where beatings produced works of fiction. The tools needed for producing such fictions were clubs, screaming, and bathtubs....
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Always Someone Leaving
Image via Unsplash One day before the fall of Saigon, an infant Beth Nguyen was carried by her father out of the country and toward a new life in the United States. But her mother stayed — “or was...
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It’s Not Like I Even Wanna Talk about How I’m the Only Black Person Watching...
Photo by Ray Moore / Creative Commons Kevin Smith rolls into town and sells out the local arts theater. The place is packed with remarkably full beards and colorful hair, Iowan stoners wearing Mooby’s...
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Hecho en El Salvador
Photo by Alex Andrews / Pexels I’m an adult, but my grandmother makes my shirts. The ones with good wicking properties that I wear on my morning runs. Five days per week she sits behind an industrial...
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After the Murder
Aftermath of a riot in Washington, D.C., following Martin Luther King, Jr.'s funeral in 1968. Photography by Warren K. Leffler, via the Library of Congress. Donovan X. Ramsey grew up in Columbus,...
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The Paradox
Illustration by Prachi Gupta. It’s not very often that the word “necessary” in a book review feels, well, necessary. And yet, more than perhaps any other book to come across my desk this year, I want...
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What Should Men Do with Their Hands?
"Remembering Vienna III" by Camille Billops via the Minneapolis Institute of Art My enthusiasm for pockets has never failed to surprise the men who overhear it. They respond as if it is I, not the...
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The Protagonist Is Never in Control
Illustration by Anne LeGuern In your first memory of him, you are four years old, and you are being suffocated. You are under a blanket, having a pretend tea party with your best friend. She is his...
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When Horror Is the Truth-teller
Illustration by Kaitlin Chan, courtesy of the artist and Restless Books No one is likely to shame you for not having read Dracula, the way they do The Mill on the Floss or Middlemarch, though perhaps...
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Allegiance
The author in her Brownie uniform. (Courtesy of the author.) Susan Kiyo Ito has been torn for most of her life between telling and not telling her story. “Since the start of my life, I have been a...
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Déja Vû
Photo by Hemerson Coelho on Unsplash In West Pullman, leveled homes left in their wake grass tall enough to tickle knees. Slabs of particle board or perforated metal covered the entrances of what was...
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Flipping Grief
Photo by Milivoj Kuhar on Unsplash After my younger brother died, I began to get calls from people who wanted to buy my parents’ house. As I write this, Conor has been dead for over three years....
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On Beauty and Violence
Christoffel Puytlinck, Still life with meat and dead birds, ca. 1660 – 1671, oil on canvas. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum. As a child, violence was a geography I could visualize: a slab of earth in the...
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Stillwaters
Stilbaai, via Wikicommons I am driving to stillwaters, to Stilbaai. Driving a narrow dirt road along wide empty land that bears sign of scars. White wash farm homes stare blank at open veld....
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I, Ghost
An extract from the Gaza Damage Proxy Map, an open-source mapping tool adapted from the war in Ukraine. Yellow indicates a 70 percent probability of population and property destruction since October...
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Al-Qahira
Tahrir Square during the revolution in 2011. Photo by Hossam el-Hamalawy via Flickr/Creative Commons. Once, she was not your city. Once, she was a tent, and in 641 AD, a dove laid an egg in her belly....
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From the Edges of a Broken World
Photo by Ryunosuke Kikuno / Unsplash Guernica regrets having published this piece, and has retracted it. A more fulsome explanation will follow.
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Arrivals and Departures
Photo courtesy of the author Much of Grace Loh Prasad’s needed debut, The Translator’s Daughter, is about the aftermath of a choice she didn’t make. When she was only two years old, her parents fled...
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