Exile

A film about departures, the kind without return.

The ocean’s iron lungs.

Writing as an intransitive catastrophe and the hyperbole of literature.

Fiction in search of a vanished homeland

“You heard everywhere talk of the end of ideology, the end of history—what end? If people are alive, there is no end.”

“It’s so important to make your own little specks of peace around you. It’s a matter of being an idiot.”

Claire of the Sea Light and the mysteries the ancestors share.

Imagine that the place you call home is no more, not just your house or apartment, but the entirety of your surroundings, including ideological ones. What if borders that were once maintained by thick concrete slabs and barbed wire suddenly disappeared?

We left on a school day, so Esther wouldn’t see us.

Open Letter, 2009

Mercè Rodoreda (1908–1983), often acclaimed as the greatest modern Catalan author, worked as a seamstress and wrote novels while in exile in France and Switzerland for over 20 years during Franco’s regime. 

This First Proof contains the short story “Traveling Fools.”

Crazy people tend to have lots of talent. It must be a sort of compensation.

The way in which my friendship with Sensini developed was somewhat unusual. 

I can’t remember where I first met Nuruddin Farah, but it was at some sort of conference. 

Cuban writer Antonio Benítez-Rojo is best known for his monumental study The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective (1989). 

Mahmoud Darwish was the 2001 winner of the Lannan Prize for Cultural Freedom. He is considered one of the foremost poets of the Arab world. 

This First Proof contains three poems by Virgil Suárez.

I met Dubravka Ugrešić in 1996 at an orientation session at the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe College, where we were asked to sit in a close circle and tell our life stories in front of perfect strangers.