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. It is
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 been very generously granted to Niloufar Talebi and Consequence
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 morality. ~James Baldwin In
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 hundred residents were expelled to
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 Sympathizer (2015). His published books also include Race
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 two decades ago after we
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 tiny park along
As I was reading about the group of women in Handmaid’s Tale red robes and white bonnets who staged a pro-choice protest in the Texas senate this week on Monday, March 20th, I was thinking about the power of image. The group of women—channeling the characters in Margaret Atwood’s dystopian
1. So I found myself sitting on a bench, waiting in a wooden building at Fort Holabird, an Army base in Baltimore, Maryland. A corporal, looking glum, walked through the rows of new recruits who were still dressed in blue jeans and button-down shirts, raggedy shorts and holey tee-shirts, distributing
Fascist. Totalitarian. Authoritarian. These words continue to appear more frequently in American and international media, amplified by the looming US 2020 election. As with many socio-political terms, such as “Left”, “Right”, “Far-Left”, “Far-Right”, “Moderate”, “Centrist”, usage and meanings are shorthand, usually lack historic context, their meaning shaped by individuals’ political
The name “Ku Klux Klan” apparently derived from the Greek word “Kyklos,” from which comes the English word “circle.” Klan was added for the sake of alliteration. Founded after the Civil War, the KKK spearheaded resistance to Reconstruction. A branch was based in Indiana in the early 1900’s, when it was at its
