Yury Lvovich during the war (1941-46) “ . . . But there is another victim: my son, a Komsomol member, who fought in the war as an artillery officer and was among the first to take Berlin. His war decorations and awards, earned with courage and blood, defending the...
Editor’s Note: When we posted this interview, we asked readers to send us any questions they might have, so we could forward them to Sharon for a response. We’ve included several of those questions and her subsequent responses after Natylie’s interview. ✢ After four...
On a misty September day in 1914, King George the Fifth, dressed in shooting gear, stands in a field at Windsor Home Park. He aims his hammer gun at a target several hundred feet away, and fires. Beside him, a dapper man in his thirties named Dick Sheppard covers his...
“Alexander and Bucephalus” by Victor Adam Lemercier You’re a foot soldier in the invincible Macedonian army. You are led by a man named Alexander who may be a god. But lumbering toward you on this day in 331 B.C. is an animal that outweighs you by 6,000 pounds....
Editor’s Note: This excerpt from Self-Portrait in Bloom is set in Tehran, Iran, during the Iran-Iraq war that lasted from 1980-1988. The Shamlous referred to here are the iconic Iranian poet Ahmad Shamlou (1925-2000) and his wife Aida. Photograph permission has...
Editor’s Note: this essay was selected to appear in Pushcart Prize XLVI (2022 edition) The children are always ours, every single one of them, all over the globe; and I am beginning to suspect that whoever is incapable of recognizing this may be incapable of...
Once located on a spur off the coastal road between Tel Aviv and Haifa, Tantura was a fishing and agricultural village counting 1,490 residents. Attacked on May 22-23, 1948, the village fell after a brief battle; claims of a massacre are still debated. Some twelve...
Abstract: Viet Thanh Nguyen is a Vietnamese-American writer. He is the Aerol Arnold Chair of English and Professor of English and American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. He is 2016 Pulitzer Prize winner for his debut novel, The...
I end wars. When I arrive at bases and conflicts, my job is to help close them, move them, go underground. My military experiences travel the circumference of war, seldom intersecting the dangerous center of the bulls-eye target. My first duty station closed more than...
It’s six o’clock in the morning. A beautiful, mercifully cool summer Sunday morning. The final day of the three-day Stokes Folks Family Reunion. My father’s side of the family. Father’s mother’s side to be exact. Stokes to Ford to Frazier. I’m sitting in a gazebo in a...
