Articles tagged "War"
The Poet Who Asked for Forgiveness
At its essence, the purpose of North Korean literature is to praise the Korean Workers’ Party. While South Korean poetry deals with topics such as love or life, North Korean poetry refers only to…...
Salman and the Mule Suicides
My acquaintance with Salman extends back to our military service, to the winter of 1984, I think. In that year I began to serve in a series of units that fought in the mountains, cities, and canebrakes…...
Be Quiet, Soldiers
At the Ajeerda divide, the strip of land that separates the marshes on the eastern side, east of the city of Amarah, we were gathered into deeply dug-out positions. Thousands of soldiers, dressed in khaki…...
A Portal in Space
The Friday bombardment started a little later than usual, at 8:30 a.m. The sound was loud and clear. Umm Anwar sighed, and her pain showed clearly in her expression. Furrowing her brow and ready to explode,…...
The Arab Altar
The last thing on our minds was celebrating our wedding, after we had waited so long, to the sound of air raid sirens and the reverberation of Dushka guns targeting the Iranian airplanes attacking Baghdad.…...
An Interview with Chan Koon-chung
Chan Koon-chung’s gray, shoulder-length hair is a throwback to the seventies, when Chan founded an influential cultural and alternative lifestyle magazine, City Magazine. Chan has since made a point…...
The Beginning and End of the Oil Curse?
Why does oil wealth so often become a curse for developing states? In the developing world, oil-producing states are fifty percent more likely to be ruled by autocrats, and more than twice as likely…...
Ludwig and I Kill Hitler for No Reason (or, A Berlin Springtime)
"Another piece of pepperoni?" Ludwig offered generously. "Thanks, I'm full." I patted my stomach. "Full," Ludwig repeated the word, enchanted. "It's been so long since I heard that word." He glanced…...
Illustrating Conflict: Perspectives from FIBDA
Under the heading "Algiers, Bubbles without Frontiers," this year's International Comics Festival of Algiers (Festival International de la Bande Dessinée d'Alger, or FIBDA) provides an important…...
The Ghosts are Schrödinger Cats
It was one of those evenings when the world was coming off its hinges, and once again, who knows why, someone decided to be unwise enough to care for it so that it wouldn’t. I stood in the armory…...
To Arrive
When you get off the airplane, it will not be like Kabul airport, or like other cities of Afghanistan for that matter, where they drive stairs up and attach them to the door and then take down the passengers…...
War and politics in Angola
In some ways the novel Mayombe resembles an old World War II movie. A rugged military officer and his closest friend are fighting for a better life, but their passion for the same woman tests their friendship…...
from “Ru”
I came into the world early in the Year of the Monkey, during the Tet Offensive, when long strings of fireworks hanging from the houses exploded in polyphony with the sound of machine guns. Saigon was…...
from “Purge”
When the Baltic Germans were invited into Germany in the fall of 1939, one of the sisters’ German classmates from school and confirmation classes came to say good-bye, and promised to return. She…...
Imaginary Return
1984 It was night. The ninth night. The most silent, the most oppressive. Under the whiteness of snow, in the darkness of time, the edges of the earth were lost. It was night. The ninth night. The smuggler…...
Let Us Talk
First, we will bury you in the sand, with your head free to speak about mutual understanding, about peace; first, we will make your field our own, station soldiers between mine and thine, direct…...
from “Farm 54”
Galit Seliktar and Gilad Seliktar map a soldier's first evacuation
The graphic novel Farm 54 brings together three semi-autobiographical stories from the childhood, puberty, and early adulthood (military service years) of its female protagonist, growing up in Israel’s…...
“The Patience Stone” by Atiq Rahimi
In Afghanistan—where, eight years after the toppling of the Taliban by US and allied troops, women are still routinely arrested and jailed for “running away” or for adultery, where current…...
Father’s Return from War. Topics
Father went to war. Then he died in the war. When our neighbors found out the news, they looked at us, Mother and me, with pity. Later on they found out that Father did not die but he had eloped with a…...
From “Pol Pot’s Smile”
1 The road through the landscape. You have to drive well below the speed limit of 70 kph unless you already know the wheeltracks, the potholes, the curves. Roads in Cambodia aren’t much different.…...
The Front
"The Front" is taken from Not-Quite-Botched Dispatches (But a Hard Sell for the Nightly News), a series of fictional reportages; as satire, they take for their target the trumpery and fabrication inevitable…...
Review: “A Girl Made of Dust” by Nathalie Abi-Ezzi
Writing literary fiction with a child's point-of-view is not a job for the faint-hearted; to construct a compelling narrative with only a linguistically-limited and innocent voice as a conduit is a daunting…...
The Way You Speak about a Cold
Moldova is a forgotten country. Even in Europe, many people hardly know of its existence. Forgotten countries are often poor, and this is also the case with Moldova. It's one of the poorest countries in…...
An Athenian Story…from Afghanistan
This is the fourth installment in a series of "Athenian Stories" from Gazmend Kapllani as a complement to our Greek issue this month. In these short dispatches, Kapllani documents the experience of immigrants…...
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