[{"id":276253,"date":"2026-08-27T05:08:03","date_gmt":"2026-08-27T09:08:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=276253"},"modified":"2026-08-26T15:53:36","modified_gmt":"2026-08-26T19:53:36","slug":"5-book-reviews-you-need-to-read-this-week-8-27-2026","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/5-book-reviews-you-need-to-read-this-week-8-27-2026\/","title":{"rendered":"5 Book Reviews You Need to Read This Week"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
Our smorgasbord of sumptuous reviews this week includes Megan Nolan on Jon Ronson\u2019s\u00a0The Castle<\/em>, Kasia Boddy on William Kennedy\u2019s Albany Trilogy, Jonathan Dee on Kurt Andersen\u2019s\u00a0The Breakup<\/em>, Johanna Thomas-Corr on Meg Mason\u2019s\u00a0Sophie, Standing There<\/em>, and Ali Winston on Gil Dur\u00e1n\u2019s\u00a0The Nerd Reich<\/em>.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Brought to you by\u00a0Book Marks<\/a>, Lit Hub\u2019s home for book reviews.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cMany of the very odd characters Ronson has documented previously have been men who desire or assume positions\u2014whether an Islamic fundamentalist or an army Colonel\u2014which seem inextricably linked to their ideas of maleness. Now, we have in Ronson\u2019s new book,\u00a0The Castle<\/em>, a far deeper investigation of masculinity and its fallibilities. He is looking at the stories of men who find themselves somehow displaced: left reeling, they are doing exceptionally strange things in response.<\/p>\n

\n
\n

There has already been plenty written on \u2018What\u2019s Gone Wrong for Men\u2019; about the lost generation of boys\u00a0underachieving in school, supposedly abused by a flippant misandrist culture, turning to nasty, nihilistic iterations of masculinity a la Andrew Tate. But Ronson is not grappling with the manosphere (luckily, as I don\u2019t think that I can read another word about it as long as I live). Instead,\u00a0The Castle<\/em>\u00a0contains a series of riveting portraits of very different men who, he believes, are unravelling because of the same condition: acute purposelessness caused by a rapidly changing society.<\/p>\n

\u2026<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Linehan chapter is brilliant: insightful, candid and moving. I\u2019m still not convinced that any broader crisis of masculinity or male purpose had much to do with Linehan\u2019s downfall, though. He wasn\u2019t at a loss or empty of purpose when he began his campaign. He didn\u2019t turn to vitriol because he didn\u2019t have anything else to do. His case is, if anything, notable for involving a man with an enviable life and abundant success throwing it away for reasons that to many in the outside world may seem obscure or deranged.<\/p>\n

\u2026<\/p>\n

\n
\n

\u201cIt will be up to the reader to decide whether the various narratives in\u00a0The Castle<\/em>\u00a0coalesce convincingly to support the notion that we live in a \u2018a world of unravelling men.\u2019 For me, they don\u2019t, simply because each case is so idiosyncratic. But it doesn\u2019t matter: this is an unmissable piece of work. It speaks highly of a book\u2019s page-by-page value when I haven\u2019t even got room to discuss Ronson\u2019s encounter with disgraced cannibal-fetish movie star Armie Hammer. Ronson\u2019s nose for squirreling out a strange, compelling fellow is unparalleled, but his careful consideration of them is an even bigger gift. Rare indeed to find a real reporter who is also a real thinker. And the bastard\u2019s funny, too.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2013Megan Nolan on Jon Ronson\u2019s\u00a0The Castle: Adventures in the World of Unraveling Men<\/em><\/strong><\/a>\u00a0(The Observer<\/em><\/a>)<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

“Three of Kennedy\u2019s novels\u2014Legs\u00a0<\/em>(1975),\u00a0Billy Phelan\u2019s Greatest Game\u00a0<\/em>(1978), and\u00a0Ironweed\u00a0<\/em>(1983)\u2014have recently been collected by the Library of America as\u00a0The Albany Trilogy.<\/em>\u00a0These novels exemplify what\u2019s best and most distinctive in his work. Kennedy never stopped believing in the power of the novel to provoke and challenge, but journalism taught him that the form worked best when grounded in the telling naturalistic detail, the vivacious rhythm of everyday talk, and a bracing dose of humor. The result is an unruly, delightful hybrid: the modernist novel as written from the metro\u00a0desk.<\/p>\n

\u2026<\/p>\n

\u201cKennedy was now thinking of writing \u2018the big Albany novel.\u2019 He envisioned something along the lines of\u00a0Ulysses,<\/em>\u00a0the portrait of Dublin that James Joyce wanted to be \u2018so complete that if the city one day suddenly disappeared from the earth it could be reconstructed\u2019 from its pages. But instead of a single day, Kennedy\u2019s Albany version would encompass two centuries, depicting the Civil War, the growth of capitalism, immigration, Prohibition, the Great Depression, and much else. He imagined a cast of historical figures mingling with \u2018a vast crowd of priests, nuns, gamblers, gangsters, mothers, whores, and laboring men, including my father\u2019\u2014all \u2018eternally living out their destinies, over and over again.\u2019 This Albany would be a \u2018magical place\u2019 making the national as well as the local story \u2018visible.\u2019 He made a note to himself: \u2018Commit a decade to the creation of this book.\u2019<\/p>\n

\u2026<\/p>\n

\u201cThe time frame of\u00a0Ironweed\u00a0<\/em>overlaps with that of\u00a0Billy Phelan,\u00a0<\/em>and though it retains some of the exuberant malarkey of the earlier novel, it\u2019s a much more somber and lyrical piece of writing. It also steps more confidently into magical realism.\u00a0Ironweed<\/em>\u00a0opens with Francis visiting the graves of his family in St. Agnes Cemetery, unaware that the dead are trying to talk to him. Among them is his baby son, who rests in \u2018infantile sublimity, exuding a high gloss induced by early death\u2026. He was neither beautiful nor perfect \u2026 but rather an ineffably fabulous presence.\u2019 Francis weeps and prays, then looks up at the sky, where \u2018a vast stand of white fleece, brutally bright, moved south to north in the eastern vault of the heavens, a rush of splendid wool to warm the day.\u2019 But the mood doesn\u2019t last. A few chapters on, we see Francis in a friend\u2019s bathroom, smelling his \u2018fetid crotch\u2019 and reaching for soap with which to wash his \u2018encrusted orifices, crevices, and secret folds.\u2019 Is this the same book? In true Joycean fashion,\u00a0Ironweed\u00a0<\/em>wants both symbolism and naturalism, the elevated language of heaven\u2019s vaults alongside the unadorned details of bodily filth.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2026<\/p>\n

\u201cHow many readers will complete the cycle? Don\u2019t most of us pick and choose in Balzac, Zola, and Faulkner? And does it matter whether we think of the first three novels as a trilogy or, as Kennedy described them, simply as a \u2018trio\u2019 within his larger project? In some ways, there is a strange kind of unity to these three\u2014all are set during the Depression, all feature stylish renegades. In\u00a0Billy Phelan,<\/em>\u00a0the McCall brothers form \u2018Albany\u2019s own Trinity,\u2019 while Martin makes a \u2018three-horse parlay\u2019 and asks a source who gives him two unprintable statements, \u2018Shall we try for three?\u2019\u00a0Ironweed\u00a0<\/em>has an epigraph from Dante, and its action spans three days, during which Francis reflects on the three women he loved. He was once a professional third baseman, and recalling those days, he thinks of the \u2018Trinitarian talisman\u2019 of \u2018a hand, a glove, a ball.\u2019 And so on. On the other hand, one of the more frequent recurring insights of these novels is that to be human is to be incomplete.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2013Kasia Boddy on William Kennedy\u2019s\u00a0Albany Trilogy<\/em><\/strong><\/a>\u00a0(Harper\u2019s<\/em><\/a>)<\/p>\n

\"the<\/p>\n

\u201cNovels set in the future aren\u2019t exclusively the province of science fiction; anxious times tend to generate anxious, cautionary literary dystopias, and when was the last time you can remember not feeling anxious? The 20th century in particular abounded in such visions, some of which\u2014The Handmaid\u2019s Tale<\/em>, or\u00a0Brave New World<\/em>, published in 1932 and getting spookier every day\u2014have proved more prophetic than others. They\u2019re best understood, though, not as genuine bets on our future, but as dreamlike unleashings of present-day fear over the blind volatility of the moment. Kurt Andersen, in his new novel\u00a0The Breakup<\/em>, does something few such books do (Jon Raymond\u2019s excellent 2022 climate-disaster novel,\u00a0Denial<\/em>, comes to mind); he sets his stage not in some distant century when our own problems are the stuff of history, but a mere 19 years from now, when most of his readers are still likely to be around.<\/p>\n

\u2026<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a good setup. What\u2019s puzzling is that more than 300 pages of the novel go by before the engine of the Zimbalist family car, and thus of the novel\u2019s plot, finally turns over, and the much-touted road trip begins. Before that comes a vast and dramatically static stretch of what speculative-fiction circles often call \u2018world-building\u2019\u2014 a full, inventive, elaborately detailed portrait of Andersen\u2019s vision of the next 19 years of American history. It\u2019s fun to read, particularly since it involves the imagined fates of a great many present-day famous people. (Among the many dozens of such cameos, surely one spoiler won\u2019t hurt: Elon Musk dies of an overdose en route to Mars.)<\/p>\n

As a novelist, Andersen\u2014whose works of nonfiction include\u00a0Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America<\/em>\u2014 is more philosopher than plot maker. The will-they-or-won\u2019t-they domestic drama of the Zimbalists, when it finally gets out of the driveway, is less than suspenseful; it is very much like spending a week in a car with three people laughing at a series of inside jokes and then explaining to you why those jokes are funny.<\/p>\n

But so what? Domestic dramas are already thick on the ground in American fiction. What readers of\u00a0The Breakup<\/em>\u00a0will come for, in this moment of what seems like unsustainable polarization and anger and wanton trampling of American civic institutions and ideals, is a vision of our near-term future that is violent and admonitory and cathartically terrible and yet somehow still survivable. On that score, Andersen delivers the dopamine hit that has made his previous work best sellers. In his 2045, there\u2019s still a new Sally Rooney novel (one with a very funny title), and the government even offers tax credits to book publishers who hire human beings as copy editors instead of just letting A.I. do it. How dystopian can things be?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2013Jonathan Dee on Kurt Andersen\u2019s\u00a0The Breakup<\/em><\/strong><\/a>\u00a0(The New York Times Book Review<\/em><\/a>)<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen Meg Mason\u2019s\u00a0Sorrow and Bliss<\/em> was published in 2021, it seemed to infect the reading public. The New Zealander\u2019s third novel\u2014following other works that had slipped into the world without making any noise\u2014sold hundreds of thousands of copies, gathering prize nominations, a screen deal and a tribe of A-list fans. Central to its success was the protagonist Martha Friel, a clever, beautiful and nettlesome British journalist systematically dismantling her marriage on her 40th birthday. The novel was sharply observed, balancing mid-life regret with an unromanticized portrayal of enduring mental illness. Mason managed the high-wire act of rendering clinical depression legible and domestic ruin funny. By Christmas it had been canonized as the pinnacle of \u2018sad girl lit\u2019 with Martha taking her place in that post-Fleabag<\/em>\u00a0lineage of fractured female characters.<\/p>\n

Sorrow and Bliss<\/em>\u00a0catapulted Mason\u2026into publishing royalty. But this status must have condemned her to a relentless cycle of literary festivals, given that her new semi-autobiographical novel displays a microscopic interest in their inner workings. It is a bold, if mystifying, artistic choice to spotlight the administrative purgatory of soundchecks, microphone clips and green rooms.<\/p>\n

\u2026<\/p>\n

\u201cThe narrative runs almost entirely on the fumes of over-weighted trivialities. Pages are devoted to cheese sandwich-level dilemmas. You know: should the protagonist get ham or cheese? When and where should she refill her water bottle? For how many seconds should she microwave porridge? Does she have enough phone battery charge? Water bottles, smartphones and microwaves are intended as totems of modern isolation, but Mason lingers over them until they become padding. Where\u00a0Sorrow and Bliss\u00a0<\/em>felt bracingly direct,\u00a0Sophie, Standing There\u00a0<\/em>is an exercise in pedestrian sentiment. Sophie is a wet cardigan of a protagonist\u2014drippy, colorless and so devoid of personality that most of her exchanges with her best friend concern an actual lost cardigan. Readers of\u00a0Sorrow and Bliss<\/em>\u00a0will remember how Martha\u2019s dark history gave her despair a compelling logic. Here, we simply discover that a dull girl is dull for a reason. The long-trauma tease, lurking like a storm cloud over a drought-stricken landscape, drizzles across a few late pages, leaving thirsty readers scrambling for nourishment.<\/p>\n

\n

\u2026<\/p>\n

\u201cI found myself torn between despair for a publishing industry that ushered this into print, and a strange, euphoric relief at encountering a book so authentically, humanly gauche that it can\u2019t possibly have been written by AI.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2013Johanna Thomas-Corr on Meg Mason\u2019s\u00a0Sophie, Standing There\u00a0<\/em><\/strong><\/a>(The Times<\/em><\/a>)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\"The<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cUnlike most contemporary accounts of Silicon Valley,<\/em>\u00a0The Nerd Reich<\/em>\u00a0is not a biography, an inquest into a particular business, or a \u2018true crime\u2019 accounting; it is an urgent intellectual history of a seemingly inchoate political moment. His project, which connects the rapacious search for profits with the quest for total control over our political, economic, and social lives, reveals that the fever dreams of our tech overlords are borne of a eugenics-friendly, totalitarian current that has long run underneath the surface in the high technology sector. The difference today is that the nerds are done pretending they are beholden to, or accountable to, anyone other than themselves.<\/p>\n

\u2026<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat truly binds together this movement is a desire for freedom from, if not total control over, nation-states; a belief in the superiority, either innate or engineered, of a superior class of elite coders and engineers; and a complete rejection of any conception of social responsibility or equality under the law. \u2018For many years, these ideas\u2014that nations would collapse, that democracy would become obsolete, that a tech-powered elite would rule through technology\u2014seemed like fringe science fiction fantasy to most observers,\u2019 Dur\u00e1n writes. \u2018But they have now become the operating principles of some of the wealthiest and most powerful men in the world and have spawned a movement promoted by a rotating cast of venture capitalists, fringe philosophers, and political operatives who took these ideas from obscure blogs to the halls of power.\u2019<\/p>\n

\u2026<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen it comes to the Pentagon, readers may be shocked at the degree to which the government has handed over the reins to the AI companies: Dur\u00e1n details the create of \u2018Detachment 201\u2019 in June 2025, which resulted in four executives from Meta, Palantir and OpenAI being inducted into the United States Army reserve at the rank of colonel. These firms are now essentially in charge of crafting American defense policy on artificial intelligence software, autonomous weaponry, and the future of warfare. The fox is truly in the henhouse.<\/p>\n

\u2026<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat does work to the book\u2019s advantage is Dur\u00e1n\u2019s methodical approach and consistency of perspective: he does not fall into the all-too-familiar trap of favoring access over accountability, a pitfall that has ensnared countless journalists down the years. Tech reporters are, even at this late stage, still vulnerable to this kind of starry-eyed boosterism, epitomized by Kara Swisher\u2019s decades of gullible, industry-friendly copy and Jonathan Weber\u2019s book-length insider account of the Valley,\u00a0City on the Edge<\/em>. The latter, published earlier this year, could have been a useful account of Silicon Valley\u2019s radicalization over the past quarter-century that have turned it into a wealthier, crueler place. Instead, Weber\u2019s fondness for recounting business deals, media inside baseball and the chummy elements of San Francisco\u2019s famously incestuous and cutthroat politics leaves knowledgeable readers scratching their heads at the gaping holes in his account. That\u2019s not the case with\u00a0The Nerd Reich<\/em>, which elucidates the higher-level architecture of what motivates the region\u2019s wealthiest power players\u2014and the grave stakes of the moment.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2013Ali Winston on Gil Dur\u00e1n\u2019s\u00a0The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy<\/em><\/strong><\/a>\u00a0(The Baffler<\/em><\/a>)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Our smorgasbord of sumptuous reviews this week includes Megan Nolan on Jon Ronson\u2019s\u00a0The Castle, Kasia Boddy on William Kennedy\u2019s Albany Trilogy, Jonathan Dee on Kurt Andersen\u2019s\u00a0The Breakup, Johanna Thomas-Corr on Meg Mason\u2019s\u00a0Sophie, Standing There, and Ali Winston on Gil Dur\u00e1n\u2019s\u00a0The<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":873,"featured_media":276254,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[43069,6,43070,43135],"tags":[36298,15654,13821],"class_list":["post-276253","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-craftandcriticism","category-features","category-literary-criticism","category-readinglists","tag-5-book-reviews-you-need-to-read-this-week","tag-book-marks","tag-book-reviews"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-19RH","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/The-Castle.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276253","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/873"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=276253"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276253\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/276254"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=276253"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=276253"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=276253"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":275943,"date":"2026-08-27T05:07:54","date_gmt":"2026-08-27T09:07:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=275943"},"modified":"2026-08-24T20:35:10","modified_gmt":"2026-08-25T00:35:10","slug":"stories-from-memory-on-finding-inspiration-in-my-husbands-moroccan-family","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/stories-from-memory-on-finding-inspiration-in-my-husbands-moroccan-family\/","title":{"rendered":"Stories From Memory: On Finding Inspiration in My Husband\u2019s Moroccan Family"},"content":{"rendered":"

In my living room a framed photograph hangs on the wall. A man clad in balloon pants and torn white shirt tosses a wooden pitchfork full of straw into the air with athletic grace. He’s threshing. Behind him spreads a green valley uncluttered by cars, roads, or electric wires. Crouching at the edge of the field, two small children can be seen.\u00a0 One is watching the threshers, but the other turns back, facing the camera. His white robe is ripped; his feet are bare. That boy grew up to be my husband. The photo, taken in 1971, could depict a much earlier time\u2014a century, perhaps two centuries before. What is it that makes the world of this photo such a foreign country\u2014is it distance, or time? To whom does this landscape belong? To my husband, to me, to our children? Or can anyone get a visa to the vast country that is the past?<\/p>\n

I met my future husband Ali in the cramped supply room of the public high school in Tinghir, Morocco where we were both members of the teaching staff. We were formally introduced when the man in charge of the ancient mimeograph machine teased, \u201cWatch out for that one, he might try to steal your pen.\u201d He was boy band cute, with a mop of tousled black curls and a klieg light smile. I had just turned twenty-two. Such is young love. The differences\u2014native language, religious and cultural background\u2014seemed trivial. Our youth alone was a wide path of common ground.<\/p>\n

As I imagined the story, I realized I could draw upon memory\u2014mine, my husband\u2019s, and of the life we had shared.<\/p>\n

Later that year, I visited his family for the first time. We drove high into the mountains on a single-lane, unpaved track that threaded in terrifying switchbacks alongside treacherous cliffs. At six thousand feet, we entered a narrow valley, where a ribbon of green laced between tall barren mountains. Ali\u2019s father tilled tiny ancestral fields using an irrigation system developed during the Roman empire. His mother spent hours gathering kindling which she carried on her back. His parents could not read or write, and spoke only Tamazight (Berber), the indigenous language of Morocco. You could define this life by what they lacked\u2014electricity, running water, bathrooms, navigable roads. Or you could define it by what they had, an intact agrarian-pastoral culture with ancient ways\u2014seasonal herd migration, news carried by singing poets, communal celebrations, intact tribal and extended family ties.<\/p>\n\"\" Ali at the threshing field, circa 1974.<\/span>\n

By the time we met, Ali had already begun the slow process of departure that started when he left home at age ten to continue his schooling and became permanent when we moved to America for him to enroll in a PhD program. At first, we had no way to contact his family except for in-person visits, which were expensive and therefore rare. But the village slowly began to change, opening to the rest of the world with paved roads and electricity, cell phones and satellite TV and eventually the internet. His family still lives there, but they no longer live in the village of my husband\u2019s youth.<\/p>\n

Living in America, unable to visit, unable to call, Ali and I shared the memories of his home. It\u2019s contours lived on between us in a deep and private well of stories that not even our children could understand\u2014the wall his father dreamed of building around their house, the shrines his mother visited to try to heal his brother who was born with bent legs, his uncle who served in the French colonial Army and came home telling wild stories about his wartime experiences that no one believed.<\/p>\n

That last story\u2014about the uncle\u2014stuck with me. I imagined Moroccan soldiers who\u2019d served in the French army in World War I. How could you describe what you\u2019d been through and seen in a language that had words for horse and hedgehog and threshing field, but none for cannon, or machine gun, or steel? What would it have been like to depart the High Atlas Mountains and travel by boat and train to the Western Front where European powers had spent centuries using industrial might to develop weapons of war?<\/p>\n\"\" Elizabeth and Ali, 1985.<\/span>\n

It\u2019s no surprise that eventually a story found me, about a boy, born in the High Atlas, and a horse born in the Sultan\u2019s palace. The different circumstances of their births are dwarfed by the modernity that bears down on both as they find themselves pulled into the giant vortex of the First World War.<\/p>\n

The past is not so much foreign as free, free to anyone who is willing to do the work, to enter the past with a spirit of curiosity and a willingness to conjure a living world out of the detritus that history leaves behind.<\/p>\n

It was act of audacity to try to imagine the world through the eyes of a young boy leaving his home in the Atlas Mountains in 1899, to put myself in the shoes of a colonial soldier who ends up at the Western Front, to inhabit a young French woman who encounters this same Moroccan soldier and tries to help him, and to march with a French soldier, born in the colony of Algeria, who has never set foot in France until he arrives to fight a war. But as I imagined the story, I realized I could draw upon memory\u2014mine, my husband\u2019s, and of the life we had shared. It took me forty years to reach that level of confidence, but when I was ready, I dove in without fear.<\/p>\n

Because here\u2019s the thing. The past belongs to no one, and as such, it also belongs to everyone. What makes good historical fiction is the author\u2019s authority, and there are many different routes to authority. My path was through lived experience, shared stories, and most importantly, along the lanes of memory. My authority came from encountering life in the High Atlas Mountains before the present replaced the past, slowly but surely, leaving only memory and story in its wake.<\/p>\n

The writer L.P. Hartley once famously said \u201cthe past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.\u201d But I find that I don\u2019t quite agree. A foreign country is a real place that you can <\/i>visit, that you can learn about, and that eventually with time and openness, can stop being foreign at all.<\/p>\n\"\" A woman carrying threshed wheat.<\/span>\n

The past is different\u2014as impossible to access, as imaginary as Narnia or the Land of Oz. It\u2019s a place we construct out of whatever it is we believe that we know and try to convince our readers to follow.<\/p>\n

Which brings me once again to the task of the writer of historical fiction. Everyone who wants to travel into history must cross the most forbidding distance\u2014that of time itself, and of the relentless power of the present to warp our views. \u201cThe past,\u201d one of my characters, Hassan, a Moroccan soldier, says, \u201cis a country you cannot visit except in your mind.\u201d I would argue that the past is not so much foreign as free, free to anyone who is willing to do the work, to enter the past with a spirit of curiosity and a willingness to conjure a living world out of the detritus that history leaves behind.<\/p>\n

_______________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Fallen for France<\/a> by Elizabeth Letts is available from Ballantine Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In my living room a framed photograph hangs on the wall. A man clad in balloon pants and torn white shirt tosses a wooden pitchfork full of straw into the air with athletic grace. He’s threshing. Behind him spreads a<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":31723,"featured_media":275958,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[43071,43069,6,43103],"tags":[15324,111880,111879,9364,23613,1922,18248,3401,5880,14402,9424,16228,10879],"class_list":["post-275943","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-craft-and-advice","category-craftandcriticism","category-features","category-memoir","tag-ballantine-books","tag-elizabeth-letts","tag-fallen-for-france","tag-family-stories","tag-fiction-writing","tag-historical-fiction","tag-husbands","tag-inspiration","tag-marriage","tag-morocco","tag-novel-writing","tag-penguin-random-house","tag-random-house","story-type-inspiration"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-19MH","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/High-Atlas-Toubkal-1.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275943","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/31723"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=275943"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275943\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/275958"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=275943"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=275943"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=275943"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":275977,"date":"2026-08-27T05:06:14","date_gmt":"2026-08-27T09:06:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=275977"},"modified":"2026-08-24T20:53:04","modified_gmt":"2026-08-25T00:53:04","slug":"a-poetry-of-witness-and-invention-wallis-wilde-menozzi-on-translating-antonella-anedda","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/a-poetry-of-witness-and-invention-wallis-wilde-menozzi-on-translating-antonella-anedda\/","title":{"rendered":"A Poetry of Witness and Invention: Wallis Wilde-Menozzi on Translating Antonella Anedda"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cIn my poetry,\u201d she said, \u201cthere has always been an emphasis on concrete detail, put more simply, I think I fell in love with reality….When we are interested in the world, we become disinterested in ourselves.\u201d Antonella Anedda, born in Rome to a family with centuries of roots in Sardinia, shows us the consequences and artistic possibilities of her disarming and passionate relationship with reality in the bi-lingual volume of her selected works, Emerging from the Winter Sea<\/i>, FSG, August, 2026.<\/p>\n

The publication of this rich compilation tracing eight of her books, from Winter Residences<\/i> (1992) to Geographies (prose)<\/i> (2021) comes at a time when poetry needs oxygen if readers are to breathe more freely once they have encountered it. Rejecting the imaginary lyrical voice, her work offers the beauty of commonplace detail from which stories make truth evident as complexity. From politics, the environment, to concepts of self, Anedda pulls herself back to let us experience simultaneous viewpoints that release language from its polarizing narratives.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf I wrote, it\u2019s with concern
\nbecause I was worried about life
\nthe happy people
\ncaught in evening\u2019s shadows
\nthat by evening suddenly fell on them from behind.\u201d<\/p>\n

Anedda\u2019s capacity to turn perspectives around by narrating unwritten angles in the same story is her most characteristic gift. She often constructs a dialogue among the poem\u2019s elements and the reader. Her juxtapositions nudge what is commonplace into something larger, polyphonic and new. Her poem \u201cSeptember 11, 2001″ is an example of how she opens reality. Alluding to the attack only in the title, Anedda notes a few events showing the effects, patterns and tasks of an illustrator, the men seeking martyrdom, as well as the earthworms, gnats and the snail working the soil. She herself kneels, leaving us somewhere quiet as we contemplate the other story.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

\u201cSeptember\u2014says the calendar half consumed with drawings
\nof insects on its pages. Almost October is anticipated by the shells of snails
\none for every day to cancel fear with their slowness.<\/p>\n

Praise these earthly creatures, the brief flight, the patient hand
\nthat draws: against the flames, against the celestial sky of paradise.<\/p>\n

Below in the vegetable garden the radiant architecture of earthworms,
\na veil of ants under the apple tree. I kneel to the mud, the gnats
\nthe snail, to the effort with which it climbs my fingers.\u201d<\/p>\n

Anedda\u2019s way of capturing different moments from different linguistic or interpretive points of view allows the everyday elements of our lives to find space in poetry, democratically.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe things I name in poetry are not noble:
\nthey stay under the palate, waiting, conscious only of the warmth.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the same poem:<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s not music that you mean, but a thunderous clap of dishes, hail
\nthat beats against the wall.”<\/p>\n

Anedda resists explaining the dominance of largely male voices of past narrations. She sees oppression in many categories from poverty to war and as such creates space for other ways of telling. Anedda\u2019s capacity to create a deeper frame of reference builds as she lets the world speak. She invites readers to hear other voices\u2014nature, soldiers, daughters, slaves, the dead, weather reports, all constants, all changing.<\/p>\n

\u201cAutumn shines in a corner and the word forms
\nin its own rhythm: in clots, in vacuums,
\nin flashes, within centuries.\u201d<\/p>\n

Her language draws on ancient ones, dialects, extinct and modern ones.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe word splits like wood
\nas wood crackling on one side
\nhalf burning
\nhalf abandonment.”<\/p>\n

Anedda accepts her composite language for contemporary poetry, (although not without irony).<\/p>\n

\u201cI was thinking of larger words,
\nstrong enough to shake every sound from the shrub
\nI heard it alive in the throat: a fervor
\nthat would have recognized in things
\na flash of wisdom.\u201d<\/p>\n

For English readers, whose cultures and histories have largely been defined by the individual, Anedda\u2019s more collective interpretation of an identity repudiates social definitions. \u201cWhat\u2019s in a name? Nothing. A sound that summons a body, a bell that yokes you to it. To receive a name is the first proof that we are under the power of others.\u201d She embraces fluidity and change. Writing poetry about violence is not the same as experiencing it.<\/p>\n

\u201cTurning our heads here, we think: while down there
\nit happens for real to the ones being chased.\u201d<\/p>\n

Thus, the way the environment, family, war, memory, art are written about arises from a natural concern about narrative. She suggests that much of the way we read is influenced by our beliefs. She challenges how much we can really know.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe read history, we imagine the meaning of a siege.
\nPots burn in the dark
\nfull of wind and sand.
\nHow else would you know to describe the vortex of hunger
\nthat spins in the void with other ghosts?”<\/p>\n

The traces of war appear in each of her books, as life and in death.<\/p>\n

\u201cNews of the latest massacre arrives this evening
\nwhen you have put the last items in the washer
\nand pulled back the covers to ready the beds for sleep.
\nOn the TV screen, the only light in the dark room,
\ndead faces and living dead, flashes of explosions,
\nnaked bodies, and, in the rubble, a dog.”<\/p>\n

\u201c8:a.m.
\nwe take the elevator down
\nunaware of storms on the coast
\nof corpses already tight in oilcloth and jute.\u201d<\/p>\n

For us not facing the bombs of actual war, the poet asks alarmingly direct questions about its persistent effects in all epochs.<\/p>\n

\u2014\u201cYou really think not to be punished is enough not to be guilty,
\nbut you are guilty.
\nThe air is full of screams. They stick to the walls.\u201c<\/p>\n

\u2014\u201cWhat makes the cemetery of a bombed city a cemetery.
\nWhich contrast between the living and the dead, what memory of wind
\nand light\u2014sea light\u2014from the Pisan frescoes.\u201d<\/p>\n

She neutralizes narrations of glory.<\/p>\n

\u2026\u201dthe dust thrown to confuse
\nthe verdict: we are not saved
\nwe don\u2019t save
\nexcept with an oblique courage
\na gesture of minimum light.\u201d<\/p>\n

As her translator, Anedda\u2019s thought, as well as some of her courage, became part of my existence in the long months such a project entails. Rendering something complex and alive, trying not to invent but remaining faithful to her language in another language, took over my thinking. Like a researcher in a lab, I was touching energies that were potentially life changing. I couldn\u2019t allow them to escape. Translations can be done in many ways. Beside particular word choices and possible errors, the decision of how one interprets the work\u2014whether to bring it into more contemporary form, to alter images to find equivalencies for English readers with different sensibilities\u2014is a constant. Trying to come closer to her lexicon and her vision, instead of rendering a smoother poem in English, was my main challenge.<\/p>\n

I have lived as a writer in Italy for nearly fifty years and I tilted when necessary, in that direction. For us who come from literary traditions with shorter histories, Anedda\u2019s knowledge of language, her awareness of how it can die, how we forget its power to define and defend truths was the energy pushing my translations. Hers is a poetry that speaks from centuries of poetry, for its need for renewal, for its exits and entries into community, for its capacity to witness and invent, for the beauty of connection.<\/p>\n

______________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Emerging from the Winter Sea<\/a> by Antonella Anedda, translated by Wallis Wilde-Menozzi, is available from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cIn my poetry,\u201d she said, \u201cthere has always been an emphasis on concrete detail, put more simply, I think I fell in love with reality….When we are interested in the world, we become disinterested in ourselves.\u201d Antonella Anedda, born in<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5789,"featured_media":276042,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[43069,6,43070,43073],"tags":[111659,111658,6547,13990,5495,31902,212,1262,5934,55088],"class_list":["post-275977","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-craftandcriticism","category-features","category-literary-criticism","category-on-translation","tag-antonella-anedda","tag-emerging-from-the-winter-sea","tag-farrar-straus-and-giroux","tag-italian-literature","tag-italy","tag-macmillan","tag-poetry","tag-translation","tag-translators","tag-wallis-wilde-menozzi","story-type-italian-literature"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-19Nf","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Antonella-Anedda.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275977","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5789"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=275977"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275977\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/276042"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=275977"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=275977"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=275977"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":275290,"date":"2026-08-27T05:01:23","date_gmt":"2026-08-27T09:01:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=275290"},"modified":"2026-08-28T11:16:56","modified_gmt":"2026-08-28T15:16:56","slug":"leila-and-kahled","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/leila-and-kahled\/","title":{"rendered":"Leila and Khaled"},"content":{"rendered":"

The sunlight streaming through the arrival hall windows was a dirty gold the afternoon our flight from Paris landed. The airport\u2019s walkways, draped in stock images of healthy, smiling families, submerged arriving passengers in advertisements recalling the sentimental beige hue from, say, The Bridges of Madison County<\/em> (a film I loved, despite its singular Americanness), or any number of American films from the 1970s.<\/p>\n

I had dreaded passing through this airport for months beforehand. Hassan, one of the graduate students, was questioned for over two hours for no reason other than racial profiling. He was a French citizen with a Tunisian surname. He was left to wait in one of the \u201cArab rooms,\u201d the legendary places of interrogation known to Arabs who travel here. Two border police had entered separately to ask Hassan the same questions in turn, mostly the names of his father and grandfather, who were French citizens born in Tunisia. It was as if his interrogators were so surprised by an Arab presence here, they needed to ask the same questions five or six times.<\/p>\n

I was relieved to have arrived without a glitch after weeks of worry about buying the right kind of travel cancellation insurance because of a startling number of reports about a new flu from China that could change or end our itinerary.<\/p>\n

Khaled stood in front of a currency exchange kiosk with Chlo\u00eb, his co-organizer for the delegation. Chlo\u00eb was preoccupied with logistics; she and Khaled would be narrating our routes and destinations. She waited until everyone had gathered on the other side of the passport control kiosks and explained the plan to leave the airport for our hotel. We walked in a group toward the parking garage and the bus. As we slid our suitcases into the hold in turn, Chlo\u00eb introduced us to each other and to our driver, Nihad, a guy in his twenties who she said was Palestine\u2019s championship chess player. At least half of the twenty-one delegates were from Quebec, three were from Cameroon, and the rest lived in or around Paris. One lived in Marseille. All of us stood together waiting for everyone to organize themselves. A\u00a0friend in Montreal had mentioned the delegation to me because she was working with an affiliated institute for West Asian scholarship. The trip was designed for scholars, not tourists. It had no particular study agenda, though, which appealed to me. I\u00a0jumped on board because I\u00a0knew I\u2019d never travel around Palestine alone. It was a way to learn about \u201cthe situation,\u201d as Palestinians call it; to speak to Palestinians at home; to see a bit of daily life, the towns and cities, the hills and valleys, the checkpoints and suspicion.<\/p>\n

The first thing Khaled said to me was \u201cWelcome home.\u201d I noticed the unusual colour of his eyes, dark amber through a hazel screen. He looked younger than me\u2014I had just turned fifty-one.<\/p>\n

I was overcome with self-consciousness, though I was jet-lagged, hyper-aware of my immediate surroundings, of Palestine, of Khaled\u2019s mesmeric beauty. As if I had fallen through a hole in the fabric separating my Montreal world from my present circumstances and could absorb only the present, everything around me was made more intense as he started to ask me all kinds of questions. Chlo\u00eb had already told him my father was born in Palestine and left for the US as a young man. I\u00a0said something about my father\u2019s neighbourhood in Quds, wondering if he lived there himself, though I didn\u2019t ask. The thought of it, the possibility, had a surreal quality. I\u00a0don\u2019t remember his questions, only that there were several and I was unused to being the object of anyone\u2019s interest in this way\u2014curiosity about my father, when he left the country, and where he had lived. I\u00a0mentioned my sitto and jiddo, who were forced to leave the city fourteen years after their son, to live with my parents in Winnipeg after 1967. Well, they weren\u2019t forced exactly, but they were close to seventy by then, and they had endured Israeli military occupation since 1948 and, decades before that, British divide and rule.<\/p>\n

This conversation was my first encounter here with a Palestinian. His amber eyes were fixated on mine. Their unusual intensity intimidated me. I\u00a0met them, but I grew nervous as we spoke\u2014aware of my speech and the way I sounded, the way an echo might surprise you were it to capture your tone. As we spoke in the parking garage that afternoon, I lost myself in a hyper-awareness of Khaled\u2019s physical nearness to me. I\u00a0found myself smiling too much. In new social situations, I usually moved between care and indifference, presence and absence. The attention he paid me and my history didn\u2019t minimize the curiosity about him kindling at the back of my mind, though I would normally be repelled when faced with that sort of scrutiny. The truth is, I felt too shy to ask him anything. I\u00a0thought of other shy people I knew, and it seemed to me that their shyness magnified their presence; an aspect of their behaviour, always unspoken, was a way of drawing attention to themselves instead of enabling their disappearance. Hiding to be found, as if they knew that performing the shame they felt would draw more attention. How many filmmakers create this psychodynamic with the camera? There\u2019s an essay or a monograph in the question that I want to write one day. In the moment I was too perplexed by receiving this focused attention from a beautiful stranger to formulate any questions for him in turn. I\u00a0was fixed, frozen. I\u00a0wasn\u2019t conscious of my attraction until later. In retrospect, I don\u2019t know if I felt attraction or curiosity that day. Is there a word for this in-betweenness? Frisson?<\/p>\n

Our conversations were a mystery, he would tell me later. Now, his eyes met mine and searched my face as I spoke. I\u00a0didn\u2019t experience it as invasive, merely intense. There was kindness in his voice, his inquisitiveness an authentic curiosity. When I am the object of someone\u2019s curiosity, I sense they want something from me, as if I am about to be robbed, but he never gave that impression. I\u00a0was reminded of a line in Hiroshima, Mon Amour<\/em>: \u201cDo you mind talking with me a little? It is very late to be lonely.\u201d<\/p>\n

After five minutes, I interrupted the flow and told him I was going to find a seat onboard the bus. I\u00a0regretted it immediately, as if I had cut short something irreplaceable, and the regret persists to this day, strangely intense for the kind of decision anyone might make in a parking garage, anticipating leaving. I\u00a0sat on the bus and watched him from the window. I\u00a0understood later that my ringing regret was tied to subconsciously apprehending his curiosity about me, or attraction, though I didn\u2019t know which it was at that time. I\u00a0ruminated on whether he would perceive my decision to stop the conversation and climb aboard as cold, even rude. Maybe he would interpret it, if at all, as jet lag.<\/p>\n

When everyone was on-board, Khaled faced us, holding a slip of blue paper that was the entry visa issued at the customs kiosks. He warned us not to lose this little piece of paper the size of a small Post-it note under any circumstances, to put it somewhere safe, to be able to retrieve it at any time, when asked at checkpoints or anywhere else. He displayed more self-confidence speaking to the group than either of us had mustered during our conversation, and as he finished, he looked at me and smiled before turning to take his seat.<\/p>\n

__________________________________<\/p>\n

From <\/em>Leila and Khaled<\/a> by Nyla Matuk. Used with permission of the publisher, House of Anansi. Copyright \u00a9 2026 by Nyla Matuk.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The sunlight streaming through the arrival hall windows was a dirty gold the afternoon our flight from Paris landed. The airport\u2019s walkways, draped in stock images of healthy, smiling families, submerged arriving passengers in advertisements recalling the sentimental beige hue<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":63,"featured_media":275293,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[25508,3,43074,43076,26764],"tags":[517,112091,111646],"class_list":["post-275290","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-daily-fiction","category-excerpts","category-fictionandpoetry","category-from-the-novel","category-novels","tag-house-of-anansi","tag-leila-and-khaled","tag-nyla-matuk","story-type-daily-fiction"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-19Ca","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/leila.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275290","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/63"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=275290"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275290\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/275293"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=275290"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=275290"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=275290"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":276249,"date":"2026-08-27T04:56:17","date_gmt":"2026-08-27T08:56:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=276249"},"modified":"2026-08-27T07:49:12","modified_gmt":"2026-08-27T11:49:12","slug":"the-independent-press-top-40-bestsellers-fiction-32","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/the-independent-press-top-40-bestsellers-fiction-32\/","title":{"rendered":"The Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers: Fiction"},"content":{"rendered":"

Here are this week\u2019s Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers<\/a> for fiction, based on sales in hundreds of independent bookstores nationwide, generously provided by the American Booksellers Association.<\/a> Compiled, designed, and distributed by The Independent Publishers Caucus<\/a>.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

1. The Calamity Club<\/em><\/a> by Kathryn Stockett (Spiegel & Grau)
\n2. The Odyssey<\/em><\/a> by Homer, Emily Wilson (Transl.) (W.W. Norton)
\n3. The Poison Daughter<\/em><\/a> by Sheila Masterson (Slowburn)
\n4. I Who Have Never Known Men<\/em><\/a> by Jacqueline Harpman (Transit Books)
\n5. John of John<\/em><\/a> by Douglas Stuart (Grove Press)
\n6. Heart the Lover<\/em><\/a> by Lily King (Grove Press)<\/span>
\n7. The Unselected Journals of Emma M. Lion: Vol. 1<\/em><\/a> by Beth Brower (Rhysdon Press)
\n8. The Unselected Journals of Emma M. Lion: Vol. 2<\/em><\/a> by Beth Brower (Rhysdon Press)
\n<\/span>9. On the Calculation of Volume (Book I)<\/em><\/a> by Solvej Balle, Barbara J. Haveland (Transl.) (New Directions)
\n<\/span>10. Small Things Like These<\/em><\/a> by Claire Keegan (Grove Press)
\n11. Stoner<\/em><\/a> by John Williams (NYRB Classics)
\n12. Taiwan Travelogue: A Novel<\/em><\/a> by Shuang-zi Yang (Graywolf Press)
\n13. The Unselected Journals of Emma M. Lion: Vol. 3<\/em><\/a> by Beth Brower (Rhysdon Press)
\n<\/span>14. I See You’ve Called in Dead<\/em><\/a> by John Kenney (Zibby Publishing)
\n15. The Unselected Journals of Emma M. Lion: Vol. 4<\/em><\/a> by Beth Brower (Rhysdon Press)
\n<\/span>16. Lights Out<\/em><\/a> (Into Darkness Series #1) by Navessa Allen (Slowburn)
\n<\/span>17. Helen of Nowhere<\/em><\/a> by Makenna Goodman (Coffee House Press)
\n18. The Unselected Journals of Emma M. Lion: Vol. 5<\/em><\/a> by Beth Brower (Rhysdon Press)<\/span>
\n19. The Butcher Legacy: A Dr. Wren Muller Novel<\/em><\/a> by Alaina Urquhart (Zando)
\n20. Writers & Lovers<\/em><\/a> by Lily King (Grove Press)<\/span>
\n21. Stitched<\/em><\/a> by Eli McCann (Torrey House Press)
\n22. Kindred<\/em><\/a> by Octavia E. Butler (Beacon Press)
\n23. The Unselected Journals of Emma M. Lion: Vol. 6<\/em><\/a> by Beth Brower (Rhysdon Press)
\n<\/span>24. The Overstory<\/em><\/a> by Richard Powers (W.W. Norton)
\n<\/span>25. The Employees<\/em><\/a> by Olga Ravn (New Directions)
\n<\/span>26. Foster<\/em><\/a> by Claire Keegan (Grove Press)
\n<\/span>27. The Berry Pickers<\/em><\/a> by Amanda Peters (Catapult)
\n<\/span>28. My Brilliant Friend<\/em><\/a> by Elena Ferrante (Europa Editions)<\/span>
\n29. The Unstoppables<\/em><\/a> by David Biro (Regalo Press)
\n30. Witch Hat Atelier 1<\/em><\/a> by Kamome Shirahama (Kodansha Comics)
\n<\/span>31. Culpability<\/em><\/a> by Bruce Holsinger (Spiegel & Grau)
\n<\/span>32. The Iliad<\/em><\/a> by Homer, Emily Wilson (Transl.) (W.W. Norton)
\n<\/span>33. We Were Forbidden<\/em><\/a> by Jacqueline Harpman (Transit)
\n<\/span>34. The Unselected Journals of Emma M. Lion: Vol. 7<\/em><\/a> by Beth Brower (Rhysdon Press)<\/span>
\n35. Orbital<\/em><\/a> by Samantha Harvey (Grove Press)
\n36. The Unselected Journals of Emma M. Lion: Vol. 8<\/em><\/a> by Beth Brower (Rhysdon Press)
\n37. Victorian Psycho: A Novel<\/em><\/a> by Virginia Feito (Liveright)
\n38. Freyja<\/em><\/a> by Margr\u00e9t Ann Thors (Spiegel & Grau)
\n39. Three Bags Full<\/em><\/a> (A Sheep Detective Story) by Leonie Swann (Soho Crime)
\n40. Carmilla, Deluxe Edition: The Dark Sapphic Romance that Inspired Dracula<\/em><\/a> by Sheridan Le Fanu (Pushkin Press)<\/span><\/p>\n

_________________________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Here are this week\u2019s Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers for fiction, based on sales in hundreds of independent bookstores nationwide, generously provided by the American Booksellers Association. Compiled, designed, and distributed by The Independent Publishers Caucus. * 1. The Calamity<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":74,"featured_media":269719,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[43069,6,43070,43135],"tags":[108921,53909,111531,108630,112034],"class_list":["post-276249","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-craftandcriticism","category-features","category-literary-criticism","category-readinglists","tag-independent-press","tag-independent-publishers","tag-independent-top-40","tag-top-40-bestsellers","tag-top-publishers"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-19RD","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/fiction-scaled.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276249","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/74"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=276249"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276249\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/269719"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=276249"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=276249"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=276249"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":276251,"date":"2026-08-27T04:56:16","date_gmt":"2026-08-27T08:56:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=276251"},"modified":"2026-08-27T07:50:28","modified_gmt":"2026-08-27T11:50:28","slug":"the-independent-press-top-40-bestsellers-nonfiction-32","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/the-independent-press-top-40-bestsellers-nonfiction-32\/","title":{"rendered":"The Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers: Nonfiction"},"content":{"rendered":"

Here are this week\u2019s Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers<\/a> for nonfiction, based on sales in hundreds of independent bookstores nationwide, generously provided by the American Booksellers Association.<\/a> Compiled, designed, and distributed by The Independent Publishers Caucus<\/a>.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

1. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants<\/em><\/a> by Robin Wall Kimmerer (Milkweed)
\n2. The Gales of November: The Untold Story of the Edmund Fitzgerald<\/em><\/a> by John U. Bacon (Liveright)
\n3. The Book of Birds: A Field Guide to Wonder and Loss<\/em><\/a> by Robert Macfarlane, Jackie Morris (W.W. Norton)
\n4. Is a River Alive?<\/em><\/a> by Robert Macfarlane (W.W. Norton)
\n5. No Prophets: The Fight to Save Democracy from Christian Nationalism<\/em><\/a> by Jared Huffman (W. W. Norton)
\n6. This Is The Plan: How to End America’s Meltdown and Save Democracy<\/em><\/a> by Ben Wikler (W. W. Norton)
\n7. The Success Lie: Reframing Your Reality to Thrive Personally and Professionally<\/em><\/a> by Chantell Preston (Resolve Editions)
\n8. A Resistance History of the United States<\/em><\/a> by Tad Stoermer (Steerforth)
\n9. Forest Euphoria: The Abounding Queerness of Nature<\/em><\/a> by Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian (Spiegel & Grau)
\n<\/span>10. The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate\u2014Discoveries from a Secret World<\/em><\/a> by Peter Wohlleben (Greystone Books)
\n11. The Wreck of the Mentor: A True Story of Death, Despair, and Deliverance in the Age of Sail<\/em><\/a> by Eric Jay Dolin (Liveright)
\n12. Triage<\/em><\/a> by Claudia Rankine (Graywolf Press)
\n13. Man’s Search for Meaning<\/em><\/a> by Viktor E. Frankl (Beacon Press)<\/span>
\n14. The Salt Stones: Seasons of a Shepherd’s Life<\/em><\/a> by Helen Whybrow (Milkweed Editions)
\n15. S.P.Q.R.: A History of Ancient Rome<\/em><\/a> by Mary Beard (Liveright)<\/span>
\n16. A Philosophy of Walking<\/em><\/a> by Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric Gros, John Howe (Transl.)\u00a0(Verso)
\n17. How to Relax<\/em><\/a> (Mindfulness Essentials #5) by Thich Nhat Hanh (Parallax Press)
\n<\/span>18. Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next)<\/em><\/a> by Dean Spade\u00a0(Verso)
\n19. Hyperpolitics: Extreme Politicization without Political Consequences<\/em><\/a> by Anton J\u00e4ger (Verso)
\n20. Don’t Believe Everything You Think: Why Your Thinking Is The Beginning & End Of Suffering<\/em><\/a> by Joseph Nguyen (Authors Equity)
\n21. The Scenic Route: Following My Inner Compass Across 12 Countries in 12 Months<\/em><\/a> by Sarah Aviram (Amplify Publishing)
\n22. The Wretched of the Earth<\/em><\/a> by Frantz Fanon (Grove)
\n23. Talking Classics: The Shock of the Old<\/em><\/a> by Mary Beard (University of Chicago Press)
\n24. The Wave in the Mind: Imagination and the Art of Writing and Reading<\/em><\/a> by Ursula K. Le Guin (Shambhala)
\n25. Planet Money: A Guide to the Economic Forces That Shape Your Life<\/em><\/a> by Alex Mayyasi, Hosts of NPR’s Planet Money (W. W. Norton)
\n26. How to Love (Mindfulness Essentials #3)<\/em><\/a> by Thich Nhat Hanh, Jason DeAntonis (Illus.) (Parallax Press)
\n27. How to Relax: Hardcover Gift Edition<\/em><\/a> by Thich Nhat Hanh (Parallax Press)
\n<\/span>28. The Glorians: Visitations from the Holy Ordinary<\/em><\/a> by Terry Tempest Williams (Grove Press)
\n29. Ursula K. Le Guin’s Book of Cats<\/em><\/a> by Ursula K. Le Guin (Library of America)
\n30. The Beginning Comes After the End: Notes on a World of Change<\/em><\/a> by Rebecca Solnit (Haymarket Books)
\n31. Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization<\/em><\/a> by Bill McKibben (W. W. Norton)
\n32. Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses<\/em><\/a> by Robin Wall Kimmerer (Oregon State University Press)
\n33. A Brief History of the World in 47 Borders: Surprising Stories Behind the Lines on Our Maps<\/em><\/a> by Jonn Elledge (The Experiment)
\n34. Tequila Wars: Jos\u00e9 Cuervo and the Bloody Struggle for the Spirit of Mexico<\/em><\/a> by Ted Genoways (W. W. Norton)
\n35. The Wisdom of the Odyssey: Twenty-Four Life Lessons from Homer’s Epic<\/em><\/a> by Phil Cousineau (New World Library)
\n36. The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America<\/em><\/a> by Richard Rothstein (Liveright)
\n37. The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year<\/em><\/a> by Margaret Renkl (Spiegel & Grau)
\n38. Three Six Five: Prompts, Acts, Divinations (an Inexhaustible Compendium for Writing)<\/em><\/a> by Lucy Ives, Nick Mauss (Illus.) (Siglio Press)
\n39. The Power of Now<\/em><\/a> by Eckhart Tolle (New World Library)
\n40. What Tech Calls Governing<\/em><\/a> by Adrian Daub (Stanford University Press)<\/span>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

_________________________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Here are this week\u2019s Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers for nonfiction, based on sales in hundreds of independent bookstores nationwide, generously provided by the American Booksellers Association. Compiled, designed, and distributed by The Independent Publishers Caucus. * 1. Braiding Sweetgrass:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":74,"featured_media":266893,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[43069,6,43070,43135],"tags":[108921,107978,1460,112035],"class_list":["post-276251","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-craftandcriticism","category-features","category-literary-criticism","category-readinglists","tag-independent-press","tag-independent-press-top-40-bestsellers","tag-nonfiction","tag-top-nonfiction"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-19RF","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/NONFICTION-BESTSELLER.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276251","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/74"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=276251"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276251\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/266893"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=276251"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=276251"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=276251"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":275303,"date":"2026-08-27T04:53:46","date_gmt":"2026-08-27T08:53:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=275303"},"modified":"2026-08-24T20:54:38","modified_gmt":"2026-08-25T00:54:38","slug":"the-shadeless-border","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/the-shadeless-border\/","title":{"rendered":"The Shadeless Border"},"content":{"rendered":"

It was twilight. A horse approached, and from its speed it was clear that it intended to cross me. It wanted to leave Khanaqin as quick as possible and cross to Iran. Before it came close, I did my duty, gave myself a little shake and set off a landmine. The explosion hurled the horse into the air and it landed on its side with a loud thud.<\/p>\n

It stood up again with great effort, shaking itself. Its body was still warm, but the horse shivered nonetheless. It tried to move, but it staggered and fell. The horse tried to rise several more times, attempting to move, yet it stumbled every time and fell back down again. Looking at itself, it noticed a gaping wound on one of its legs; steam was rising from the torn flesh and exposed bones. Its blood had drawn crooked and contorted lines on the ground, as if a painter had splashed colorful strokes on a canvas to create a postmodern masterpiece.<\/p>\n

That night, the horse was thrashing and writhing in agony, suffering from the pain of its wound. Much of its blood had drained from its body, and as time passed, it had lost its strength and was no longer able to move. Despite the pain, it tried to nibble from the grass and plants nearby. It had become near-impossible for the horse to graze, it had no energy left and it also had to be mindful of the pieces of shrapnel and bullet casings scattered on the ground between the plants. Every time it takes a bite, its lips or teeth touched a bullet, a piece of shrapnel or a casing. When the sun finally rose, the horse resembled a weary painter who, after considerable effort, has completed his painting and fallen asleep on top of it, exhausted and barely alive.<\/p>\n

For a few days, the horse fed on the same plants and grass and drank from the rainwater collected in a puddle nearby. About a week passed in this fashion, and the wound on its leg was healing.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Gradually, the horse was getting accustomed to standing on its remaining three healthy legs and falling less often.<\/p>\n

The anti-aircraft guns and rifles of both Iran and Iraq had burst into action. From both sides, the whizzing sound of bullets, the roar of tanks, and the booming sound of artillery fire could be heard. Hence, nobody dared to approach the horse, and its owner wasn\u2019t found. I had acquired such power that nobody dared to come near me. I had grown so tall that even airplanes and helicopters were mindful of me.<\/p>\n

We were in the midst of war, and, astonishingly, I had become more prosperous and more powerful. In these recent years, I, too, have gained a status and influence, and with the assistance of mines and weapons of war, I have secured a place so strong that no one can dream of removing me.<\/p>\n

Several nights passed. No matter how much I tried to talk with the horse and start a conversation, it didn\u2019t respond and seemed dazed and confused. However, when it realized it was stuck and unable to move due to the ongoing explosions of artillery fire and bomb shells around it, understanding it could die any second, its heart gradually softened. It was no longer as restless as before and didn\u2019t turn away from me as frequently.<\/p>\n

Slowly, it spoke a few words. It knew there was no solution and it had to say some things. Even though I was its sworn enemy, who else did it have to speak to and share its heart with? While the horse spoke, its eyes were fixed on the sky, and it never looked downwards.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

I lived for twenty-one years on the warm plains of Khanaqin. I carried loads and goods towards the Bamoo mountains for the Peshmerga. Now, I want to return to the place where I was born, to die where the early days of my life were spent. I wanted to become a part of that soil. Amidst the war between two governments, I now find myself trapped at the border and amazed that I have managed to survive until today, and that this half-life of mine has not become a target for the soldiers\u2019 bullets. I can neither go upward towards the mountains nor downward towards the plains. Before the war, we used to travel without fear and hesitation, and the borders weren\u2019t so eager to take anyone\u2019s life.<\/p>\n

One morning at dawn, the sky still a bit dark, I brought Barzoo and his sister Shirin, and at this very point, perhaps a little further it, we crossed the border and headed towards Khanaqin. Shirin was sitting behind Barzoo on my back, and said, \u201cBrother! I haven\u2019t seen Khanaqin yet. What will you buy for me there?\u201d Barzoo replied, \u201cMy dear sister, I\u2019ll buy you whatever you want: clothes, scarves, shoes . . .\u201d At that time, the border between Qasr and Khanaqin had little security, and most of the time the guards weren\u2019t even at their posts. Whenever they caught someone, they could easily be bribed with a date palm leaf.<\/p>\n

It was around noon when we arrived in Khanaqin. Barzoo and Shirin\u2019s relatives came to greet them. A couple of women surrounded Shirin. I still remember the words of Aunt Zmroot, who kissed Shirin\u2019s forehead and said, \u201cMay Dawu take good care of you. You\u2019ve grown up! Four years ago, when we came to your house, you were just a little child. How time flies!\u201d Shirin replied, \u201cThank you, Aunt Zmroot.\u201d<\/p>\n

At sunset on the first day, Zmroot and her daughters had spread a big table in the courtyard and prepared soup, meat, and rice. That day, they paid special attention to Shirin and never left her alone.<\/p>\n

Shirin later complained and said, \u201cWhen Zmroot and her daughters brought me those clothes and dressed me up, I became suspicious. My brother was supposed to buy clothes for me, not Zmroot\u2019s family! Later, I realized why my mother was crying when we left.\u201d<\/p>\n

These are small fragments of Shirin\u2019s life that I have either witnessed or heard from her own mouth. That day was one of the worst days of her life. On his last trip, Barzoo had promised me and Shirin to Sayeh. On his return, instead of Shirin and me, he brought home some provisions, cloth, and clothes. \u201cShirin\u2019s life is in your hands now!\u201d he said, before he returned to the other side of the border, and Shirin and I were tied to Sayeh\u2019s fate.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

I now understood that the final return of the horse to the land of its birth was meant to reveal a secret that needed to be told.<\/p>\n

__________________________________<\/p>\n

From The Shadeless Border<\/a><\/em> by Jiyar Jahan Fard, translated by Chiya Parvizpur, published by Common Notions. Copyright \u00a9 2026 Jiyar Jahan Fard. All rights reserved.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It was twilight. A horse approached, and from its speed it was clear that it intended to cross me. It wanted to leave Khanaqin as quick as possible and cross to Iran. Before it came close, I did my duty,<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":63,"featured_media":275304,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[25508,3,43074,43076,26764],"tags":[111650,111652,111649,111651,1262],"class_list":["post-275303","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-daily-fiction","category-excerpts","category-fictionandpoetry","category-from-the-novel","category-novels","tag-chiya-parvizpur","tag-common-notions","tag-jiyar-jahin-fard","tag-the-shadeless-border","tag-translation","story-type-daily-fiction"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-19Cn","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/9781945335709.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275303","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/63"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=275303"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275303\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/275304"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=275303"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=275303"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=275303"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":275951,"date":"2026-08-27T04:01:23","date_gmt":"2026-08-27T08:01:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=275951"},"modified":"2026-08-26T14:30:10","modified_gmt":"2026-08-26T18:30:10","slug":"aruni-kashyap-on-indias-cockroach-youth-movement","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/aruni-kashyap-on-indias-cockroach-youth-movement\/","title":{"rendered":"Aruni Kashyap on India\u2019s Cockroach Youth Movement"},"content":{"rendered":"

Novelist Aruni Kashyap joins co-hosts V.V. Ganeshananthan and Jennifer Maritza McCauley to talk about the surprising surge of a new youth movement in India. Kashyap, the author of a new novel, How to Date a Fanatic,<\/i> about young queer academics navigating the Indian campus protests of the mid-2010s, explains how the Chief Justice of India likening unemployed youth to \u201ccockroaches and parasites\u201d has prompted the rise of a wildly popular satirical group. He shares the history of the Cockroach Janta Party or Cockroach People\u2019s Party, whose followers now number in the millions and whose political demands have become well known. Kashyap discusses those demands and the historical significance of campus politics in India, considers how a satirical organization is pushing real reform, and recalls his own experiences with campus protests in India, where he grew up and previously taught. Kashyap reflects on writing about political violence, love, and queer life in India. He reads from How to Date a Fanatic.<\/i><\/p>\n