In this short story by Juan Álvarez, a young man, forced to confront his Uncle Javier's violence, recounts its effect on his family.   Who has heard my voices? Is it Clotaldo? —Life is a Dream, Calderón de la Barca   I never wanted to sock you in the face, Javier, let’s just get that clear. Things happened the way they did because you left me no choice. Two plus two is four, and four plus two is six, simple as that, and if I’m...

In this excerpt from his novel An Orphan World, Giuseppe Caputo explores the love between a father and son in the midst of poverty, as well as questions surrounding violence and homosexuality.   A butterfly flew down to a dark place; all beautifully colored it seemed; it was hard to tell. MAROSA DI GIORGIO   One night, many moons ago, my father gave me a star. We lived on the breadline, as we do now, in a sad house with next to no furniture. And since the house...

In this short story by Óscar Collazos, two brothers whose parents consider them beyond redemption bond over unspeakable acts and their communal rebellion.   Alberto returned home and went to his room without saying a word, evading Mom’s eyes (What are you doing home? I thought you went to Confession?) and avoiding her questions. Then I thought: Something must have happened to him. I chose to continue on with the sports page, distracting myself by...

Claire, recently returned to Bogotá after years living abroad, visits The House of Beauty in the city’s posh Zona Rosa and is instantly reminded of everything she hates about Bogotá’s racial and class divisions.   1 I hate artificial nails in outlandish colors, fake-blonde hair, cool silk blouses, and diamond earrings at four in the afternoon. Never before have so many women looked like transvestites, or like prostitutes dressing up as good...

Aziz Chouaki's Algerian immigrant arrives to the sensory assault of Paris in this excerpt from The Eagle. Marcadet-Poissonniers metro station, 7:30 p.m. An enormous bag on his back, Jeff’s looking for rue des Portes-Blanches. As if in a dream, he crosses rue Ordener, which is buzzing with life. He’s just off the plane, it’s eight years since Jeff’s set foot outside Algeria. First Orly, a slap in the face, the sheer luxury of it—ah, so that’s...

In this excerpt from Négar Djavadi's novel Désorientale, an Iranian teen finds sexual and cultural identity in the Parisian punk rock scene.  The revelation came to me a bit later, through the TV (an old, poorly-functioning set left by previous renters and installed in our room by my sister Leïli), which I watched until late at night. That evening, a concert in a small venue was being shown on Les Enfants du Rock. Because Leïli and Mina were...

In this short story by Rwandan author Beata Umubyeyi Mairesse, a mother finds herself caught in the intersection of family battles and ethnic conflict. Amagara araseseka ntayorwa Guts spill on the ground but cannot be gathered back up I stayed kneeling longer than everyone else, pressing all my weight into the wooden slats. My head buried in my hands, I kept whispering, “Don’t betray his name, don’t betray his name, Lord!” When I got up, my eyes were...

Zahia Rahmani portrays the mental and physical manifestations of dual exile from both homeland and language.  Translator’s Note: Franco-Algerian author Zahia Rahmani is the daughter of an alleged Harki, one of the thousands of Algerians who fought alongside or otherwise supported the French Army during the Algerian War of Independence (1954-1962). It was the fate of such men to be twice exiled, first in their homeland after the war, and later in France, where fleeing Harki...

A Moroccan adolescent becomes obsessed with his nanny's previous charge, a French boy, and imagines a life with him.  My Lalla continued telling me stories to keep me calmly at the house, which was how my father liked it. I liked to listen to her, but she simply liked to know that I was close to her. She would come take me away from my friends, and other times when I was with girls, under the pretext that a boy was not supposed to play with girls. What I liked about her stories...

Calcutta native Shumona Sinha describes a communication breakdown when a French immigration officer interviews an immigrant circus performer.​   He looked perpetually amazed and stupefied. I recall having to ask him at several moments if he understood what I was saying. At several moments I thought he was simple-minded. He always took a few seconds before opening his mouth, to swallow his saliva, like a fish gasping for air. Only then did he utter a few hesitant, inaudible,...

Mohamed Abdelnabi's narrator revisits his childhood and his grandfather's path from childhood poverty to a love affair that became the stuff of family lore. My name is Hany Mahfouz. I was a spoiled only child. My mother was the sun and my father was the moon. The one who doted on me most was my grandfather, Khawaga Mida. At the age of six, I thought I had killed him. I had a dream in which he woke me, kissed me, and stroked my hair, then opened the window and floated upward...

In this excerpt from writer Nadia Al-Kokabany's Ali Muhsin Market, a silver-tongued young man lives to regret convincing his brother of a scheme to earn a few extra bucks in the midst of the Yemeni Revolution of 2011–12.    18 March 2011 With all his smooth talk about making money, Mehdi Al-Rimy convinced his younger brother to work Fridays in the bustling revolutionary square, which throbbed with visitors and men going to prayer. On those days, it was easy...

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...