In this excerpt from A Crime in Ramallah, Abbad Yahya's narrator Noor remembers his adolescence in Palestine, marked by the second intifada.  At its peak, the intifada took over my parents’ lives. They weren’t explicitly affiliated with any one faction, but they tended to support anything Islamic, and the intifada fueled the continued rise of Hamas. My older brother's wife was an activist, a leader in fact, and our family was very proud of...

In Croatian writer Zoran Janjanin’s short story of personal love and loss complicated by national conflict, two ex-lovers assess the impact of the Croatian War of Independence on their teenage relationship, twenty years later.    He noticed her out in front of the courthouse on a sunny spring afternoon. He couldn’t place where he knew her from; intrigued, he followed her for a few minutes before he mustered the courage to speak up. As graciously as he...

When her high-ranking husband disappears and is presumed murdered, a widow protects the life of her vulnerable only son, Tha'ir.   There was nothing unexpected about it. It wasn’t a coincidence, or something that just ended up happening in that haphazard way things sometimes can in life. Nor was it something done on a whim by a young man who suddenly decided to start living in the dark for some capricious reason of his own. No, this was a plan carefully thought out and...

The following excerpt is from Salvadoran writer Claudia Hernández's Roza tumba quema, the story of a peasant who dares become a guerrillera at a young age, and the daughters she will have to raise, protect, push forward during constant rural turmoil. The story is inspired by events surrounding the civil war in El Salvador, which raged from 1980 to 1992.   When she turned fourteen, three men came for her at her maternal grandmother's house, with...

In this excerpt from Kemal Varol's Wûf, we find our hero, Mikasa, reluctantly serving as a minesweeping dog at the Karakeçi military outpost in what we understand to be southeastern Turkey. He has been torn from his life roaming the streets, hanging out with his pack, “The Burning Hearts,” and courting his sweetheart, Melsa. Here at the outpost he is only known as “Bobi” by the soldiers, but little does he realize that the vile...

I didn't understand what it meant to be a man. If in the past I thought that it was enough to have genitals dangling between one's legs, now I began to doubt. I doubted, because Uncle Marcelo's did dangle but nobody in the village considered him a man. Then would the perfect male be one who fathered children? "Of course not," I answered myself. My grandfather fulfilled that function and, in the opinion of my grandmother, he shouldn't be considered a man because he had shown...

That it is ridiculous to speak of joy that “the promised land” does not exist that our rage will find no calm. All this I know. —Reinaldo Arenas   Yes, I introduced them, but that was all. Everything that happened afterward, what they said, I swear it’s not true, sugar. Úrsula was on the other side of the tracks when I met Tomás, so it was me he saw first. He looked at me and said, Going North? We became traveling companions, and—this...

This excerpt is adapted from David Albahari's novel Brother (first published in Serbian in 2008). The novel's protagonist is Filip, a writer living in Belgrade whose novel, A Loser's Life, idealizes his childhood and family. Filip receives a letter from someone he has never heard of, a man named Robert, who claims to be Filip's older brother. Robert writes that he has just arrived in Belgrade from Australia where he, too, was working as a writer, and would like to meet with...

Santiago had seen the young man watching from afar for some time. While he related his story, he noticed—out of the corner of his eye—that the kid was trying to get Pérsio’s attention. He moved around nonstop, speaking loudly, but Pérsio was entirely immersed in Santiago’s words, a man-boy listening to a tale of fairies, witches, princes. He had even forgotten the burning tip of the cigarette between his fingers, his mouth ajar, eyes open wide, almost...

Biljana Jovanović's novel Psi i ostali, published in Yugoslavia in 1980, explores the life of a tragic and dysfunctional family in Belgrade in the 1970s. The matriarch of the family is the ailing, elderly grandmother, Jaglika, who is of mixed Hungarian-Montenegrin descent; the rest of the family are Serbs who have grown up in Tito’s Yugoslavia, with its increasingly urban and modern style of life. The family members include Lidija (also known as Lida) and her troubled...

1 kilo goat kid’s blood, goat kid liver, lungs, and fat, goat kid ribs and bones a full glass of oil minced shallots 1 tablespoon ginger-garlic paste chopped mint leaves chopped cilantro leaves 1 tablespoon aniseed chopped green chili 3 tablespoons garam masala 1 tablespoon cumin 1 teaspoon turmeric powder salt, pepper In a large cast-iron pot, heat the oil. Brown shallots, ginger-garlic paste, mint, and cilantro, aniseed, cumin, and turmeric. Add bones and cubed lungs, fat, and...

Dreadful is the condition of the castaway better schooled in gastrosophy than shipwreckology. Predisposed to survive on what lies within my reach and in my reportoire, should I long for oven-roasted oysters with zucchini, a rock lobster with fresh favas, striped bass with celery, cabbage, and vinegar, red mullet filets with rosemary cream, breaded mullet with oysters, even a little dish of oysters Girardet, what materials do I have to attain an acceptable result? Neither wine for deglazing...

In this short story, Borja Bagunyà drops in on a riotous party that would make Gatsby blush.      Of course it wasn’t natural, but it was necessary, and unavoidable. Silvina Ocampo   You’ve likely never been to a party this big—no, to a party in a house this big; no, no, this enormous, this unbelievably enormous. So the house is big, but all this stuff and all these people make it seem even bigger, as if the fact that things keep...

Mercè Ibarz explores the mysterious origins of Alleyway S, a street whose myriad transformations mirror those of Barcelona.    Of all the streets I venture through in the city, none has offered me as much joy as Alleyway S, or as much sorrow. I even think, because sometimes you can say you think at the same time you feel something, that the joy that gradually filled me as I headed there was a prelude to the sorrow that awaited me, that awaits me there, and perhaps always...

In this excerpt from her novel The Foreign Daughter, Najat El Hachmi's narrator has resolved to give in to familial pressures to marry, comparing her situation to that of Mundeta Ventura, a character from the Monserrat Roig novel Ramona, adéu. The first novel in a trilogy, and told from a feminist perspective, it depicts the lives of women in a family living in the Eixample, a district of Barcelona that lies between the old city and what were once...

In Pep Puig’s “My Uncle,” a young boy’s world is turned upside down during a visit to Grandma’s house.   Even though they’d been brought up pretty much the same, there was a fundamental difference between my uncle and my father. My father was the child my grandparents had always wanted. Plus, they knew for a fact he wasn’t faking it. A man of the house and a man of faith, he was hardworking, brave, and responsible. If there was ever any...

In the following excerpt from her novel Adriana, Theodora Dimova weaves a tale of another poète maudit.   Adriana was venomous, irritable, depraved, evil, decadently damned, I’m like a line of Baudelaire, she was thinking, and it was over for me long ago, the decision was made long ago, and I have no way backward or forward, and I have no way, her beauty was blossoming over the mire of vices, her skin was becoming more milky white, her bones growing...

In this short story, Zachary Karabashliev chronicles one widower’s struggle to begin anew in another country.   June 11, 2010 My name is Christo Christov Christov and I’m here visiting my daughter. My daughter and son-in-law, that is. Radoslava. That’s her name, not his. They live in America, in the state of California. They got me a visa this spring and brought me here. Anyway. I’ve started keeping a diary in this notebook—my daughter gave it...

Angel Igov's short story, set in 1944, fictionalizes the events following the Communists' rise to power in one Bulgarian town.     In the thick February fog, heavy with the scent of coal, a young man was standing on the bridge by the Yuchbunar baths, tearing pages out of the notebook in his hand and tossing them into the river. When the final page had been carried off by the current, he seemed to hesitate for a moment. Then with sudden determination he tore...

Twin teenage sisters from a middle-class background are on the run from the authorities. They have joined a Partisan group based in the Balkan Mountains. The Partisans are a mixed bunch of young and old communists and peasant party members, all dedicated fighters against the Bulgarian monarchist regime and their German allies. Many have adopted colorful nicknames. Nail—short for Final Nail in the Coffin of Capitalism—or Digger—short for Gravedigger of Capitalism....