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November 14

Excerpt: KINDERLAND by Liliana Corobca, translated by Monica Cure

To celebrate the release of Kinderland, the second novel we’ve published by author-translator duo Liliana Corobca and Monica Cure,** we are proud to share a short excerpt from the book, taken from its first few pages. The novel follows three siblings, twelve-year-old Cristina and her two younger brothers, whose parents have departed for employment in foreign lands. Through Cristina's eyes, we experience the feeling of wonderment and loneliness as the three children roam the streets of a contemporary Moldovan village, imitating the gestures of the absent adults, and chasing their fading memories of normal family life.

In this opening passage, the three siblings discover that a tick has attached itself to one of their bellies, and they have to find someone to help them remove it — quite difficult to do in a town where very few adults remain.

**The first book we published by Liliana Corobca, Monica Cure's translation of The Censor's Notebook (2022), won the 2023 Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize — an amazing feat considering this was Monica Cure's first full-length work of translation!

KINDERLAND

BY LILIANA COROBCA
TRANSLATED BY MONICA CURE

The tick was stuck to his stomach, next to his belly button, sucking the child’s blood. The girl, more terrified by her brother’s shrieks than by that black dot, had gone for help. Normally, the howls would have brought out, if not half the village, at least the entire neighborhood on the outskirts of the village, but now, no one came. She could’ve taken out the tick, but what if the head got stuck there and it grew another body that was even bigger . . . or, God forbid, it went completely inside his skin and lodged there, where no one could get it out anymore and her brother would die, sucked dry by the tick.

At first, the third child, the youngest brother, who was often hit or mistreated by the other one, looked on with a certain sense of satisfaction. He kept circling his older brother in search of what was making him cry and yell so insistently. He looked around, up, down, to see whether he didn’t also have cause to let out a wail, but he didn’t see anything. The fact that Dan’s shirt was lifted, his belly naked and exposed to the sun, didn’t impress the younger brother at all, it didn’t scare him either. The black dot his brother was hunched over so tragically didn’t interest him since he couldn’t understand how a brother so big and strong could be scared by a little black dot clinging to his belly. Then the younger little boy disappeared.

The girl went out on the street. She could’ve called the neighbors, but they weren’t home at this hour. The grandmother of a classmate lived farther down, but she probably wasn’t home either and, in any case, her eyesight wasn’t good enough to get the tick out, head and all. The girl started walking down the street, in search of the right person. She also called out to Uncle Vasile, but all the dogs in the neighborhood answered her instead. At the barking of the dogs in unison, nothing happened inside the houses, no one slammed the doors or gates, no one opened them to see who was calling and why. In general, when someone called out on their street, they all heard and at least someone would answer: The person you’re looking for isn’t home, they’ve just left for the vineyard, to visit their godfather, or somewhere else. At the end of the street, she spotted a mother washing clothes in a courtyard. She didn’t know her name. She made noise as she opened the gate and the woman looked at her questioningly.

— Hello. Would you mind taking out a tick for us?

The woman wrinkled her nose in disgust and answered:

— I don’t take out ticks.

And the woman quickly went inside the house.

The girl stopped next to the well. Maybe someone would get thirsty and come by for some water. She would stay there and wait.

Meanwhile, the youngest brother brought the other brother his favorite toy. The brother with the tick ignored him. He couldn’t care less about toys right now.

It seemed like Dan would never stop crying. In the past, he had killed insects like that, which his dad had taken out of the sheep’s wool. His father had said that if you don’t take them out, ticks suck all the blood out of an animal until there’s nothing left of it. Dan imagined how the hungry tick would suck up all his blood until it became a kind of big balloon and he, small and withered, a bag of bones, would helplessly flutter his arms and legs, while the tick would start floating until it was high up in the sky. Hundreds of ticks, inflated with the blood of children, floated in the clear, smiling sky, while the scrawny, dried-out kids stuck to the ruthless bugs cried. Dan looked at his tick which, to be honest, was no bigger than half a pinky fingernail, in fact, it wasn’t even as big as a bean, but all the same he felt as if he didn’t have a drop of blood left in him.

Marcel had remembered about the beautiful apple, which he had found the day before yesterday and hidden so that he could eat it by himself, without sharing with his brother and sister. The neighbor’s apple tree had produced fruit this year and sometimes an apple would fall into their garden. Summer apples, sweet and with pink flesh. Dan, when he saw the apple, made a gesture as if to say: What’s your apple to me when I’m in pain! Then Marcel, out of brotherly solidarity, started to whimper as well.

A horse-drawn cart stopped next to the well. A man drew out a bucket of water, drank some, and then wet his horse’s nose. He looked back at the girl staring at him. Tall, skinny, ugly, almost toothless, thin and graying hair, big floppy ears, he could’ve played the part of the grim reaper if he had kept a scythe in his cart. The horse was also skinny, it had once been gray but now, dirty, it was an earthy greenish color, with long yellow teeth, as if to make up for its master.

— Would you mind taking out a tick?

— Not at all. Where is it?

— There, said Cristina as she pointed toward the gate.

— Whose daughter are you?

— My dad’s Victor Dumitrache.

— Well, well, you’re Vichiuşa’s daughter? I used to give you cart rides when you were little. Back then I had a strong, sleek stallion . . . And your pa’s gone off to make long money. The girl nodded. And he left you at the mercy of the ticks. The girl nodded again.

When they saw the man come in, the two brothers went silent, forgetting to cry.

— Where are you, tick?

Then he looked at the apple.

— What, you don’t want your apple? Let’s give it to the pony, he’ll gobble it right up!

The smaller boy again handed the apple to the bigger one, who, given the choice between him or the horse eating it, decided to take the apple without saying a word. When it came down to it, the man was scarier to him than the tick.

— What, you call that a tick, boy, it’s as small as an ant! Lemme at it!

Then he said to the girl:

— Do you have brandy or odikolon?

She did, and she went to get the alcohol. She thought to herself: He wants to drink it, get drunk, and toss my brothers over the fence.

The man approached the afflicted child. He fiercely gritted his few teeth at the tick, a gesture which made the littlest one run behind the house. He poked his head out from behind a corner after a moment because he didn’t hear anything and he was curious.

In the blink of an eye, the man squeezed the swollen tick between his blackened fingernails and threw it onto the ground, looking carefully at the boy’s belly.

— I got it out, head and all, he said with satisfaction. Now step on it.

Because the boy didn’t move, he called over the little one:

— Hey, come here, little snot-nose, come look at your brother’s tick. But the little one didn’t accept the invitation either. The girl approached with a small bottle, out of which the man poured some brandy into his palm and then rubbed it onto the boy’s belly.

— Okay, you step on it, he said to the girl.

The girl conscientiously put her foot down on the bug and jumped on it a few times.

— And you say your pa’s not home.

The children nodded their heads.

— So he’s off working. Three kids are no laughing matter. And your ma—she’s working too. They had you and then scattered every which way, said the man as he headed to the gate. My woman’s gone too, so are my kids. I’m all by my lonesome, lucky I got my horse. Come on, filly, let’s go home.

The noise of the wheels could be heard for a little while, and then silence.

The girl, too, poured a little bit of alcohol from the bottle into her palm and rubbed the belly of the child, who was sitting gravely, without moving a muscle, looking somewhere off into the distance. Of course, if Dad had been home, no tick would’ve stuck to him, it wouldn’t have gone under his skin. He felt a kind of dissatisfaction that everything had ended so simply and quickly, when he had had an excuse to be unhappy, coddled, and important.

LILIANA COROBCA is a writer and researcher of communist censorship in Romania. She was born in the Republic of Moldova and is the author of the novel Negrissimo (2003), winner of the ‘Prometheus’ Prize for debut fiction. She is also the author of the novels The Censor's Notebook (Seven Stories Press, 2022), which won the 2023 Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize, A Year in Paradise (2005), Kinderland (2013), and The Old Maids’ Empire (2015). She has received grants and artists’ residencies in Germany, Austria, France, and Poland.

MONICA CURE is a Romanian-American writer, translator, and dialogue specialist, as well as a two-time Fulbright grant award winner. Her poetry and translations have been published in journals internationally, and she’s the author of the book Picturing the Postcard: A New Media Crisis at the Turn of the Century (University of Minnesota Press). Her translation of The Censor's Notebook by Liliana Corobca, Cure's first book-length work of translation, won the 2023 Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize. She is currently based in Bucharest.

November 07

“A New Narrative” by Ed Morales: Introduction to the new edition of A Young People’s History of the United States

Sixteen years after its initial publication, we are proud to share a much expanded new edition of Howard Zinn and Rebecca Stefoff’s A Young People's History of the United States. This new edition, which features significant contributions by writer and scholar Ed Morales, offers updated language throughout, as well as new sections serving to expand our understanding of Latinx history in the US through the political movements and cultural contributions of Latino Americans, as well as expanded coverage of Native history and Asian American activism.

To celebrate the release of this new edition, also available for the first time in Spanish, we are pleased to share Ed Morales's introductory note, presented in both languages thanks to the deft translation into Spanish by Hugo García Manríquez.

A NEW NARRATIVE

BY ED MORALES

When I was in grade school, I was fascinated by maps. In my earliest notebooks, I drew maps representing where I grew up: New York City, then New York State, and finally all of the United States. One day I was looking at a map in a textbook that showed the Americas, North and South. In the Caribbean Sea I saw the island where my parents were from. The map read “Puerto Rico,” with “(U.S.)” in parentheses underneath the words.

I asked my dad why it said that Puerto Rico belongs to the United States. Did that mean it wasn’t its own country? “No,” he said. “Puerto Rico is a country. Puerto Rico is my country.”

That was the moment that I realized that the status the United States had given to my father’s homeland was that of a “possession.” It was a land that, as a famous 1901 U.S. Supreme Court decision called Downes v. Bidwell decided, belonged to America but was not part of it. In a way, the island had a double identity, and I felt something like that within myself. Even as I was growing up as an English-speaking New Yorker, playing American sports, watching American television, immersed in American culture, those influences were mixed with something else—my parents’ Puerto Rican culture—that wasn’t going away any time soon.

I was born into what could be called the Nuyorican generation. Nuyorican is a label that came from mixing together “New York” and “Puerto Rican.” The Nuyorican generation were the children of Puerto Ricans who had migrated to places like New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago. They created a bilingual, bicultural mix that pointed to the future of America, to the era of multicultural and multiracial diversity that is rapidly becoming the reality in twenty-first-century America.

The Nuyorican generation arose in parallel with other hybrid cultures created by the children of immigrants from much of Latin America. The Chicanos of the West Coast and the Southwest mixed Mexican culture, Native culture, and the cultures of American cities like Los Angeles, Tucson, and El Paso. In South Florida, the 1.5 Generation of Cuban Americans blended memories of Havana, the capital of their former island home, into their new home in Miami. To the north, Dominicans found a little bit of Santo Domingo, the capital of the Dominican Republic, in their new home, the part of Manhattan known as Washington Heights.

The narrative of these mixed cultural identities is a little-told part of American history. Yet they were never isolated from or outside the mainstream. Instead, they developed alongside the central trends in American culture. The perspective of Latin American descendants in the United States is a crucial part of understanding our history and seeing where the country is going. For that reason I am pleased to contribute three new elements to this edition of Howard Zinn’s A Young People’s History of the United States. In addition to this introduction, there are two new chapters. “The Latino Emergence” focuses on the major movements of the 1960s and 1970s. “Our Voices Need to Be Heard” brings the story into the twenty-first century, when, like members of many other communities and groups, Latino Americans continue to make their voices heard in politics, activism, and culture.

As Cuban orator, writer, and anti-colonial warrior José Martí argued, the idea of “America” being limited to the continental states of North America—Canada, the United States, and Mexico—erases the fact that the Americas are both Anglo and Latin. They were colonized by European powers, but they are also places where common folk came together in a mix of racial backgrounds and social classes that made the Americas truly a “New World.” Along with, and often intertwined with, the narratives of Native Americans, Black people, and Asian Americans, the narratives of Latino Americans are an essential part of the people’s history of the United States.

Latinos are also a political and cultural force in the present moment. Immigrants and their descendants from twenty-one different countries in Latin America make up about 17 percent of the total U.S. population. They are the second largest group in the country, and for a time they were the fastest-growing subgroup of the total population. In the early years of the twenty-first century, though, the growth of the Latino population slowed due to a lag in the American economy. People of Asian descent then became the fastest-growing population subgroup.

Latino communities are concentrated in different proportions in various regions of the country. The Northeast Corridor has one of the most diverse Latino populations. The nation’s most populous Puerto Rican and Dominican communities have long existed there, and the numbers of Mexicans, Ecuadoreans, and other South American groups are increasing. South Florida has had the biggest Cuban communities, as well as some Puerto Ricans and South Americans. The largest communities of Mexicans and Central Americans are centered in California and the Southwest.

Sometimes stigmatized as foreigners, at other times targeted as consumers and voters, Latinos are often misunderstood. Most are fully proficient in English by the third generation. They eagerly take part in the social and cultural rites of the mainstream culture of the United States. In general they are also very involved in civic responsibilities. The Latino contribution to U.S. culture is more influential than is often recognized. Is there any popular icon more all-American than the cowboy? That character has Mexican origins. Roots rock and roll has strong Cuban influences. And urban Latinos contributed to the origins of the spoken word style of poetry and hip-hop.

Latinos have often created American history through interaction with the many other immigrant and Native groups that are also integral parts of the national story, along with the African people brought to the Americas as slaves. In the Southwest, Mexicans share an intertwined history with Native American tribes and Anglo migrants to California and Texas. During the mid-nineteenth century, Mexicans living along what is now the U.S.–Mexico border were part of the “southern underground railroad” that helped enslaved Black people escape to freedom in Mexico, which ended slavery before the United States did. In the Northeast, Puerto Ricans and Cubans shared space in mambo dancehalls with European immigrants, and they shared rapping and breakdancing with Black and Afro-Caribbean people. In Chicago, Puerto Ricans and Mexicans have joined with Black and white voters to elect some of the country’s first mayors and other officials of color.

As we move forward into the twenty-first century, barriers remain to be overcome if we are to fully understand not just the role of Latinos in U.S. history and culture but also the relationship between the United States and its Latin neighbors in the Americas. The southern border of the United States projects American strength, but it is also a site of controversy. Within the borders of the United States, many people distrust those who hold on to their native language, which has led to people being attacked simply for speaking Spanish to one another in public. Citizenship, not merely as a legal status but as a narrow vision of who can be considered “American,” is still used as a weapon against Latinos. This new edition of A Young People’s History of the United States attempts to weave the narrative thread of Latinos into the larger context of American history, uniting our contributions with those of all the people who together make up the history of these United States.

UNA NUEVA NARRATIVA

POR ED MORALES

Cuando cursaba la escuela primaria me fascinaban los mapas. Mis primeros cuadernos estaban llenos de dibujos de mapas que representaban los lugares donde había crecido: la Ciudad de Nueva York, luego el estado de Nueva York, y finalmente todo Estados Unidos. Un día estaba viendo un mapa incluido en un libro de texto que mostraba el continente americano, Norte y Sur. En el Mar Caribe reconocí la isla donde mis padres habían nacido. El mapa decía “Puerto Rico”, y debajo de estas palabras, entre paréntesis, “(US)”.

Le pregunté a mi padre por qué decía que Puerto Rico pertenecía a Estados Unidos. ¿Eso significaba que no era un país propiamente? “No”, me respondió. “Puerto Rico es un país. Puerto Rico es mi país”.

En ese momento entendí que el estatus que Estados Unidos había otorgado a la patria de mi padre era el de una “posesión”. Era un territorio que, tal como lo había establecido la famosa decisión llamada Downes v. Bidwell, de los tribunales de la Suprema Corte estadounidense, pertenecía a Estados Unidos pero no era parte de éste. De cierta manera, la isla tenía una doble identidad, y yo sentía algo parecido en mi interior. Aunque crecí como un neoyorquino cuya lengua era el inglés, jugando deportes estadounidenses, viendo programas de televisión estadounidense, inmerso en la cultura estadounidense, esas influencias estaban mezcladas con algo más: la cultura puertorriqueña de mis dos padres. Eso no iba a desaparecer pronto.

Nací como parte de lo que puede llamarse la generación “Nuyorican”. Nuyorican es una categoría que viene de la mezcla de “Nueva York” y “Puerto Rican”. La generación nuyorican estaba formada por los hijos de puertorriqueños que habían emigrado a lugares como Nueva York, Filadelfia y Chicago. Crearon una mezcla bicultural y bilingüe que apuntaba hacia el futuro de Estados Unidos, a una era de diversidad multicultural y multirracial que rápidamente se ha convertido en la realidad del siglo veintiuno en Estados Unidos.

La generación nuyorican se erigió de forma paralela a otras culturas híbridas creadas por hijos de inmigrantes de casi todos los rincones de Latinoamérica. Los chicanos en la costa oeste y el suroeste mezclaron la cultura mexicana e indígena, además de la cultura de ciudades estadounidenses como Los Ángeles, Tucson, y El Paso. En el sur de Florida, la Generación 1.5 de cubanoamericanos combinó los recuerdos de La Habana, la capital de su antigua patria, con sus nuevos hogares en Miami. Al norte, los dominicanos encontraron un poco de Santo Domingo, la capital de República Dominicana, en su nuevo hogar, la sección de Manhattan conocida como Washington Heights.

La narrativa de estas identidades culturales múltiples es una parte de la historia estadounidense de la que poco se habla. Sin embargo, nunca estuvieron aisladas o fuera del mainstream. En lugar de eso, se desarrollaron a la par de las tendencias más populares de la cultura estadounidense. La perspectiva de los descendientes latinoamericanos en los Estados Unidos es parte crucial para entender nuestra historia y saber hacia dónde se dirige nuestro país. Por esa razón, me llena de gusto contribuir con tres nuevas secciones a esta edición de La historia del pueblo de Estados Unidos para jóvenes, de Howard Zinn. Además de esta introducción, hay dos nuevos capítulos. “La emergencia latina” se enfoca en los principales movimientos en 1960 y 1970. “Nuestras voces deben ser escuchadas” trae la historia hasta el siglo veintiuno, momento en el cual, como los miembros de otras muchas comunidades y grupos, los estadounidenses latinos continúan haciendo que sus voces sean oídas en la política, el activismo y la cultura.

Tal como lo declaró el orador cubano José Martí, escritor y guerrero anti-colonial, una idea de “América” limitada a las naciones continentales de Norteamérica —Canadá, Estados Unidos y México— borra el hecho de que el continente americano es anglo y latino. Fue colonizado por poderes europeos, pero también es un lugar donde personas comunes y corrientes confluyeron en una mezcla racial y de clases sociales que hicieron del continente americano un verdadero “Nuevo Mundo”. Entretejidas con las de indígenas estadounidenses, afroamericanos y asiaticoestadounidenses, las narrativas de los latinos estadounidenses son parte esencial de la historia del pueblo de los Estados Unidos.

Los latinos son también una fuerza política y cultural del presente. Los inmigrantes y sus descendientes, provenientes de veintiún países latinoamericanos, representan el 17 por ciento de la población de los Estados Unidos. Son, además, el grupo más numeroso del país, y durante una época fueron el subgrupo de mayor crecimiento del total de la población. A inicios del siglo vein-tiuno, sin embargo, el crecimiento de la población latina disminuyó debido a una desaceleración en la economía estadounidense. Las personas de descendencia asiática se volvieron el subgrupo de mayor crecimiento en el total de la población.

Las comunidades latinas se encuentran concentradas en diferentes proporciones por distintas regiones del país. El Corredor Noreste posee una de las poblaciones latinas más diversas. Las comunidades puertorriqueñas y dominicanas más numerosas han vivido ahí por mucho tiempo, y la cantidad de mexicanos, ecuatorianos y otros grupos sudamericanos va en aumento. El sur de Florida cuenta con los grupos cubanos más grandes, así como algunos puertorriqueños y sudamericanos. Las comunidades más numerosas de mexicanos y centroamericanos se encuentran en California y el suroeste.

Estigmatizados a veces como extranjeros, otras veces buscados como consumidores y votantes, los latinos con frecuencia son malentendidos. En el caso de la tercera generación, la mayoría es ya totalmente competente en el uso del inglés y participa con entusiasmo en los rituales sociales y culturales de la cultura dominante de los Estados Unidos. En general, también está muy involucrada en las responsabilidades cívicas. La contribución latina a la cultura estadounidense ejerce una influencia mucho mayor de lo que suele reconocerse. ¿Hay un ícono popular más estadounidense que el vaquero? Ese personaje tiene orígenes mexicanos. El rock and roll tiene fuertes raíces cubanas. Y los latinos de las zonas urbanas contribuyeron a los orígenes del estilo de poesía spoken word y el hip-hop.

Los latinos a menudo han trazado su historia estadounidense por medio de la interacción con otros grupos de inmigrantes e indígenas, que también son parte integral de la historia nacional, junto con los africanos traídos al continente americano como personas esclavizadas. En el suroeste, la historia de los mexicanos está entretejida con la de las tribus indígenas estadounidenses e inmigrantes anglosajones, en California y Texas. A mediados del siglo XIX, los mexicanos que vivían a lo largo de lo que ahora es la frontera entre EE. UU. y México formaban parte del “ferrocarril subterráneo del sur”, el cual ayudó a afroamericanos esclavizados a escapar hacia la libertad en México, donde se puso fin a la esclavitud antes que en los Estados Unidos. En el noreste, puertorriqueños y cubanos convivieron en salones de mambo con inmigrantes europeos, y disfrutaban del rap y breakdance con afroamericanos y negros de origen caribeño. En Chicago, puertorriqueños y mexicanos se unieron a votantes afroamericanos y blancos para elegir a quienes serían algunos de los primeros alcaldes y otros funcionarios del país.

A medida que avanza el siglo XXI, quedan aún barreras por superar, si queremos comprender plenamente no solo el papel de los latinos en la historia y la cultura de los Estados Unidos, sino también la relación entre los Estados Unidos y sus vecinos latinos a lo largo del continente americano. La frontera sur de los Estados Unidos proyecta el dominio estadounidense, pero también es un espacio en disputa. Dentro del territorio estadounidense, quienes desconfían de aquellos que se aferran a su idioma originario han provocado ataques contra personas simplemente por el hecho de hablar español entre sí en público. La ciudadanía, no solo como un estatus legal sino como una visión limitada de quién puede ser considerado “estadounidense”, todavía es usada como arma contra los latinos. Esta nueva edición de La historia del pueblo de Estados Unidos para jóvenes busca entretejer el hilo narrativo de los latinos con el contexto mayor de la historia estadounidense, uniendo nuestras contribuciones con las de todas aquellas personas que, juntas, componen la historia de estos Estados Unidos.

ED MORALES is a journalist, professor, poet and author of several books including Latinx: The New Force in Politics and Culture and Fantasy Island: Colonialism, Exploitation, and the Betrayal of Puerto Rico.

October 23

“Nowhere to go, Unprecedented, Unheard” by Paola Caridi

Above image: detail of "Palestine" by Pedro Laperal (Spain), originally printed in England by The Malvern Press, Ltd. London. Reprinted with permission by Liberation Graphics, 1985

NOWHERE TO GO, UNPRECEDENTED, UNHEARD

BY PAOLA CARIDI

OCTOBER 2023

Nowhere to go. No safe place to go. Nowhere else to go. Nowhere to bury the dead. It is a litany that is repeated relentlessly in Gaza, and with increasing intensity in recent days. Mainly since the Israeli authorities have ordered the civilian population, the Palestinians living in the Strip, to go south. The Gaza Strip, perhaps the most uncharted place in the world, has been a small land completely closed off from the outside world for seventeen years, ever since Israel imposed the blockade around its land and sea borders, leaving Egypt to manage the southern Rafah crossing. Gaza is a small strip of land where people are born, live and die without ever leaving a prison without bars. Forty kilometers, from north to south. Less than ten kilometers, east to west, between the Mediterranean Sea and the border with Israel.

For a suffering humanity that has already swelled the ranks of the displaced, more than a million people, setting out from their homes or rubble means putting something in a bag, a bottle of water, diapers for the children, something warm to cover themselves, and finding a means of transportation—a car, a cart—where they can pick up an elderly father who cannot walk. It means walking down a road already destroyed by bombs, dodging fighter plane raids, not having water, food, toilets or an electrical outlet to recharge the cell phone and communicate with the family.

It is an exodus on an unimaginable scale, of which we have very few images other than those Palestinian journalists and cameramen in Gaza manage to dispatch. No international, western or global journalists have access to the Strip. It is only Palestinian journalists in Gaza who are able to send images and reports, putting their lives at risk.

However, the "nowhere" has a direction, at least for those who are still alive. The south, toward the border with Egypt. Yet, it is not the way to a safe zone, a salvation. It is the direction of exodus. From Gaza, from Palestine, from nowhere, perhaps never to return. For Palestinians, the bitter taste that now runs from mouth to mouth is that of a new nakba, the ruination of Palestinian society that happened in 1948 and the persecution that followed. But 1948 is far away. In the year 2023, no one among the countries that frame Gaza wants the Palestinians to pass through the Rafah border. Not only because it would be unfair and unacceptable, not only because it would be a new nakba. But because Egypt and Jordan, first and foremost, would jeopardize their already delicate systems of internal control in the name of a tragedy with no exit strategy.

In the opposite direction, to the north, other victims ask where to go to find their loved ones, the more than one hundred and fifty five Israelis taken hostage by Hamas and taken who knows where inside the Strip. Nowhere to go, they too repeat, the families of the hostages. Who to ask for help? Where to go to find experienced negotiators and experts in negotiations to free the hostages? For the time being, the "nowhere to go" is the Netanyahu government—now a government of national emergency—which has provided no answers and against which many of the hostages' families have been protesting.

There is nowhere to go. It is the "untold" truth of politics—Israeli, regional, American, European—that is unable to find a rational answer to get out of a tunnel inside which, for now, only the absolute protagonists of a tragedy of enormous proportions are paying. The victims, all the victims. The civilians, all the civilians. The more than 4,000 killed, the innumerable wounded, if our conscience and values insist that we put Israeli and Palestinian victims in the same death toll.

Increasingly, in contemporary times, wars have civilians as the main targets. The thousand-day siege of the city of Sarajevo taught us an unforgettable lesson. This time, however, in this unprecedented war between Israel and Hamas, civilian casualties were and are the first, undisputed protagonists, the first targets, and at the same time the only ones who receive no serious and reasonable discussion or prioritization at all, none. No one, so far, has chosen to put them at the center of this story, at the center of this history. The full contours and scale of the tragedy for civilians is still uncertain. The politicians, all of the politicians, on all sides, have thus far chosen not to deal with them, as if they were not already fodder for the slaughter, for the battlefield, as if they were an inescapable part of the conflict.

This is unprecedented, unheard, unacceptable.

—Paola Caridi, author of Hamas: From Resistance to Regime, tr. Andrea Teti, and Jerusalem without God: Portrait of a Cruel City

October 19

“I See How This Ends” by Mona Damluji

Palestinian artist Heba Zagout was killed with her two young children by an Israeli airstrike on Gaza on Friday, October 13, 2023.

The past two weeks have brought unimaginable horror to the people of Palestine and to the people of Israel, a tragedy perpetrated by a fascistic regime at the expense of civillians. It's hard to know how to respond without falling into despair. Mona Damluji, author of the children's book Together, shares a response to the seige upon Gaza with a poem of anguish, of resistance, and, ultimately, of hope.

I SEE HOW THIS ENDS
BY MONA DAMLUJI

When I say Palestine,
I bear witness to the atrocities of history.

When I say Palestine,
I believe another world is possible.

When I say Palestine,
I remember how all the keys worn around their necks
once fit snugly in the palm of their hands as they arrived home.

When I say Palestine,
I see beautiful people healing tree roots torn from the land.

When I say Palestine,
I know right from wrong.

When I say Palestine,
I stand proudly on the shoulders of giants
and dig my heel into the eye of the monster.

When I say Palestine,
I mean Falastin and not occupied territories.

When I say Palestine,
I dream wide open spaces where life is thriving.

When I say Palestine,
I hear the cries of the grassroots, the unstoppable,
the victors of this moral battleground.

You can’t make me say conflict,
when I mean occupation.

You can’t make me say animal,
when I mean child.

You can’t make me say human shield,
when I mean child.

You can’t make me say body,
when I mean someone’s child was taken from them
and never returned.

You can’t make me say clash,
when I mean they dropped bombs
that flattened a city block.

You can’t make me say both sides.

You can’t make me say it’s complicated.

You can’t make me say endless cycle of violence.

When I say, I see how this ends,
I mean peace.

When I say, I see how this ends,
I mean justice.

When I say, I see how this ends,
I mean Palestine.

—Mona Damluji
October 17, 2023

October 12

The True Jungle, The Neon Wilderness: Colin Asher’s Introduction to the 2023 Edition

Introduction to the 2023 Edition
The True Jungle, The Neon Wilderness

By Colin Asher

The second-floor cold water flat at 1523 W. Wabansia contained two rooms overlooking an alley and through its windows you could see: a tavern called Lucky Star, a peach tree growing through a crack in a sidewalk, steam rising from the chimney of a yeast factory in the distance. It had no bathroom or refrigerator and there was nothing but an oil stove for heat, but Nelson Algren felt lucky to find it. The apartment met his needs and in two months of searching he’d seen nothing better so he rented it for ten dollars a month.

It was January 1946, and Algren had just returned from the war after two years, four months, and seventeen days in the army. He served stateside and then as a medic in Europe, and now that he was home, in Chicago, he wanted nothing more than the quiet he required to write. He christened his new home his “goat’s nest” and that winter and spring he left it sparingly—to visit the YMCA where he hit the heavy bag and showered, to peddle around on his used Schwinn to reacquaint himself with the city, or to visit the police station at 11th and State to take notes as the chief of detectives questioned arrestees.

Once he was settled, Algren looked through the short fiction he’d written over the previous thirteen years and began to assemble a collection. He was thirty-six years old that winter, but he had already led a few lives. He spent a portion of the Great Depression as a vagabond, train hopping and hitchhiking through the country—at first for survival, then to collect material for a novel. He joined the Communist Party when he returned to Chicago, raised money for the partisans fighting against Franco in Spain, and went to work for the Federal Writers Project; then he was drafted into the army.

Algren had written short stories in each of those phases—eighteen published, many unpublished—and he selected from them judiciously. Few of his earliest pieces survived the winnowing. On the whole, they were earnest and deeply felt but grim and joyless, their protagonists besieged by a hostile world. In one, a child is run over by a train while gathering bits of coal; in another, a drifter becomes trapped inside a freight car and nearly dies. Even his finest work from that period, “Forgive Them, Lord,” didn’t make the cut. It’s the story of a Black World War I veteran who witnesses a lynching, and though the story is masterful, its protagonist leads a life grounded in faith and bears no responsibility for his plight. He’s a victim, and there was no place for them in the collection Algren envisioned. Neither would there be any calls to arms, so he set aside the finely written but strident pieces he had composed during his time in the communist movement. Some of them proffered tidy solutions he had lost faith in—“all the daughters of the poor will rise.”

The focus of Algren’s writing had tightened in recent years, his characters coming to the foreground where he rendered them in indelible detail. His people had not changed—they were still drifters and sex workers and petty thieves—but they had begun to speak directly to each other and to the reader in unguarded voices, bemoaning their circumstances, and confessing their shortcomings, regrets, sins. In one, a woman airs her troubles to “Specs,” an authorial stand-in who listens but never speaks. “I think I’m just the girl that men forget, that’s what,” she says. And in “A Bottle of Milk for Mother,” Bruno Bicek dissembles impotently, condemning himself by inches over the course of an interrogation at the Racine Street Police Station. “I fired in self-defense,” he pleads. Those were the pieces Algren favored for his collection—ones that were unsettling in their intimacy, leaving the reader with the sense that they were spying on his characters, or eavesdropping on their private vouchsafes.

In its final version, his manuscript contained twenty-four stories, only seven of which had previously been published. They were set in Chicago, the city Algren has always been most closely associated with, but also the Rio Grande Valley, Arkansas, the stretch of highway between Kingdom City, Missouri, and Cairo, Illinois; Wales, France, and Germany. One takes place inside an American bar but its main character lives in the long-past day when he was injured fighting a Falangist in Spain. Some stories are almost entirely dialogue, their worlds conjured with idiom (“[I was] irresisting an officer is all.”). Others are character sketches, concise and sharply rendered. A novella-length epic, “Design for Departure,” chronicles a woman’s whole life—neglected child, factory worker, honeypot for a grift, addict.

It’s an ambitious collection, heterogeneous in its settings, characters, and styles. But it reads as a coherent whole because its stories share that confessional tone and its characters all reside within the confines of the inhospitable land referenced in the title Algren and his publisher eventually agreed on: The Neon Wilderness. For some characters, that land overlays the physical world and they survey it and despair. The protagonist of “Design for Departure,” Mary, sees her life clearly for what it is. Working in a low-rent burlesque where flashing red lights make spilled beer “appear like darkly flowing blood,” she thinks: this is “the true jungle, the neon wilderness.” For others the neon wilderness is a state of being, experienced as an absence—of companionship, of love, of purpose. Arrested and then escorted through a cluster of gawkers, it occurs to the protagonist of “Please Don’t Talk About Me When I’m Gone” that no one had ever, until that point, noticed her and stepped aside to let her pass. “And now just look what for,” she says.

The world those women navigate takes no notice of them, or any of Algren’s other characters. But Algren lavishes them with attention, capturing their distinctive language and its poetic idiom, and giving voice to their rationalizations without judgment—“I’d already had my beating for stealing, so what I had in my hand had been well paid for,” they say. He names but does not condemn their desire, common as it is repellent, to watch someone being beaten and to be reborn cathartically through their pain—to feel that each blow witnessed is redemption for “the blow his own life had been.” And he takes seriously a delinquent’s goal of abiding a motivational poster’s instruction to “learn something new each day.” Speaking to a friend, the wayward child explains that he wouldn’t be in juvenile detention for theft if he’d followed that advice. “I’d be here fer tamperin’ is all. It’d be a missed-meaner is all.”

Because Algren renders his people in such generous detail, the reader takes notice of them too. Their kind are easy to ignore outside the confines of his prose—it takes nothing to turn away when you spot them perched on a barstool at midday, or heating a meal over an open fire in a tent city by the roadside. But Algren brings the reader in so close that it’s impossible to ignore their flawed and unruly humanity, their idiosyncrasies. He even has them confess— the most intimate act—and once they have, the reader can no longer simply turn away.

Algren had been skeptical of America’s involvement in World War II. “[M]y feeling was although the Nazis had to be beaten,” he once said, “. . . this didn’t necessarily mean that we believed in exactly the opposite, that, if we won the war, then everything was going to be as it should be.” And once he returned to Chicago and settled into his goat’s nest above Wabansia, he realized that his doubts had been warranted.

That winter and spring, Algren cast a critical gaze across the postwar landscape. When he looked through his alley-facing windows, peddled through his neighborhood, or observed a police lineup, he encountered a world that had changed little, in material terms, since the end of the Depression and the conclusion of the war. People there still cycled through jails and prisons, lingered beneath the tracks of the El or before bar tops, and slept in cage hotels. If anything, they seemed more heavily burdened, weighed down by the knowledge that they would not benefit from the dividends of peace. But he found no trace of their lives in the newspapers he read, on the city’s new billboards, or on the covers of slick magazines. There, victory and virtue had become synonymous, and consumerism had taken on near-religious significance. As he watched, America was transforming itself into a country of winners, one where only those who could “afford the liquor that lends distinction” and “the beer that gives that special glow of health” were welcome.

Identity, belonging, dislocation—these had always been themes of Algren’s work. But after the war, as the country remade itself through the act of exclusion, these themes began to dominate, his critique sharpening each time he revisited them.

In The Man with the Golden Arm, published in 1949, he would write about people who felt that the city of their childhoods had become “some sort of open-aired jail.” Two years later, in Chicago: City on the Make, he would conjure the sense that life, for some, was nothing but an endless siege—“Every day is D-day under the El.” And in 1953, he would warn that ignoring his people was folly, the condition of their lives being the truest measure of the country’s moral health. “Our myths are so many,” he would write then, “our vision so dim, our self- deception so deep and our smugness so gross that scarcely any way now remains of reporting the American Century except from behind the billboards.”

Those ideas guided the creation of Algren’s greatest works, and it is in The Neon Wilderness that he first gathered them up, wove them together, and adopted a perspective to communicate them. He felt a profound sense of disappointment when he returned from the war, but rather than raging at, or scolding, his readers as he once would have, he confronted them—drawing them in close to his characters, closer, then so close that they could hear sins confessed, foolishness mumbled, losses wept over, and lovers mocked and degraded. In these stories the distance between reader and character collapses, and there is no way for the first to pretend the second does not exist.

This was Algren’s aim—recognition. These are people, he was saying, not victims or perpetrators or causes. They are equal in their humanity to all others, and just as much a part of the American story.

Here they are, look at them, look closer—see them, see yourself.

October 11

Announcing “Woman, Life, Freedom” edited by Marjane Satrapi

Marjane Satrapi’s groundbreaking collection of graphic novel style reporting has been acquired by Seven Stories Press/Seven Stories Press UK. Woman, Life, Freedom captures the unprecedented and inspiring revolution happening in Iran today.

A collaboration between activists, artists, journalists, and academics under the direction of and with contributions by Satrapi, the author of Persepolis and other graphic works, depicts the historic protests that followed the murder of Mahsa Amini, and shows in comics what would otherwise be censored in photos and film in Iran.

"Woman, Life, Freedom is a rallying cry." —from the Introduction

New York, NY + London, UK, October 11, 2024 — The book Woman, Life, Freedom, edited, introduced, and with contributions by Marjane Satrapi and translated from the French by Una Dimitrijević, will be published by Seven Stories Press and Seven Stories Press UK, the press’s publisher Dan Simon announced today. The book will be released to coincide with Nowruz (Iranian New Year) on March 19, 2024 in the US and March 20, 2024 in the UK. The independently published English edition of the book was created in cooperation with the originating independent French publisher, L’Iconoclaste.

On September 13, 2022, a young Iranian student, Mahsa Amini, was arrested by the religious police in Tehran. Her only crime was that she wasn’t properly wearing the headscarf required for women by the Islamic Republic. At the police station, she was beaten so badly she had to be taken to hospital, where she fell into a coma and died three days later. The plight of this 22-year-old woman sparked a wave of protests for women’s and human rights that soon spread through the whole country. Demonstrators adopted the slogan “Woman, Life, Freedom,” and around the world these words are now chanted during solidarity rallies.

Along with Satrapi, who directed the book’s creation, featured artists include Shadnam Adinam, Bahareh Akrami, Bee, Patricia Bolaños, Catel, Coco, Deloupy, Hippolyte, Mana Neyestani, Touka Neyestani, Pascal Rabaté, Rahi Rezvani, Paco Roca, Joann Sfar, Lewis Trondheim, Nicolas Wild, and Winshluss, who is also Marjane Satrapi’s frequent collaborator on her film work, as well as the writers Farid Vahid, Abbas Milani, and Jean-Pierre Perrin.

The book was front page news in France’s biggest newspaper, Le Monde, when it was published in France last week as Femme, Vie, Liberté. The announcement on Friday of the Nobel Peace Prize to the jailed Iranian activist, Narges Mohammadi, underscores the worldwide importance of the issue of women’s freedom and rights. Satrapi will be available for select interviews in the US and the UK when the book is published in English.

"We needed to work with people who knew Iran intimately. Among our chosen experts were Farid Vahid, a political scientist specializing in Iran at the Fondation Jean-Jaurès, Jean-Pierre Perrin, a seasoned reporter previously with Libération and now a contributor to Mediapart, and Professor Abbas Milani, a historian and Director of Iranian Studies at Stanford University. We then reached out to around twenty gifted artists who agreed to produce comics or illustrations based on texts and scenarios prepared by our experts. . . . I contributed a handful of drawings, including the cover, as well as a few written pieces. . . . The result is the volume you are holding in your hands."

—Marjane Satrapi and Abbas Milani in their introduction to the book.

For further information, please contact Ruth Weiner, ruth@sevenstories.com.

WOMAN, LIFE, FREEDOM
Marjane Satrapi et al
Translated by Una Dimitrijević
$35.95 | Trade paperback | 280 pp | 7.5 x 10”
March 19, 2024
9781644214053

October 01

Remembering Ed Young (November 28, 1931 – September 29, 2023)

If you ever had the astonishing experience of visiting Ed Young's studio, you know the awe of seeing such an unstoppable creative force at work. Every surface had a project in the works laying across it or hanging from it. Every lamp and chair back served a second role as prop for a drawing or home to an insect crafted from cut up old credit cards or a cardboard roll refashioned into a telegraphing contraption that told a story as it extended or a tiny paper roll that unfurled with Chinese characters so beautifully drawn it could make you cry. There was no end to the imagination percolating from Ed Young’s mind and spirit into the studio in his house in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York. Perhaps most mysterious and charming was the crawlspace one was encouraged to navigate—through the garage, up a ladder, through a trapdoor, to a secret, sunny space in the next building, where many of the projects he was working on entered the last stages and then completion. What a loss to us all that the wildly creative, wonderfully human Ed Young has died at the age of 92.

The renowned illustrator and writer of children's picture books was born on November 28, 1931, in Tientsin, China. As a young man he moved to the US, where he worked at an advertising agency before illustrating his first book, The Mean Mouse and Other Mean Stories, written by Janice May Urdry, in 1962. Since then he illustrated over eighty children's books, seventeen of which he also wrote. Throughout his long career he received over fifty awards and honors, including the Caldecott Medal in 1990 for Lon Po Po, his retelling of a Chinese version of "Little Red Riding Hood," and Caldecott Honors for The Emperor and the Kite (1967) and Seven Blind Mice (1992). He was nominated twice for the Hans Christian Andersen Award, the highest international recognition given to children's book authors and illustrators for their contribution to children's literature. His books frequently drew on folklore from Chinese, Native American, Indian, Persian, and other cultures, and he used a variety of media, including pencil, pastel, ink, collage, cut paper, photographs, and found materials.

We had the pleasure of working with Ed on three books that he illustrated — one also written by him, one written by Barbara DaCosta, and one written by Mark Reibstein. Yugen shows, in few words and simple yet haunting black lines, the relationship of a small boy to his mother, who has gone away. Night Shadows features Ed's singular paper cutout art to tell the story of a young girl who finds companionship with her elderly neighbor. And in Voices of the Heart, Young used paint and paper art to explore twenty-six Chinese characters, each describing an emotion, and each containing somewhere the symbol for the heart.

All of his books feel deeply personal, and it's a salve to know that in them we have Ed Young with us always.

—Ruth Weiner
Publisher, Triangle Square Books for Young Readers
Director of Publicity, Seven Stories Press
October 1, 2023

Books by Ed Young

In this deeply personal book, artist and author Ed Young explores twenty-six Chinese characters, each describing a feeling or emotion, and each containing somewhere the symbol for the heart. He combines visual symbols of the West in the same manner the ancient Chinese used in composing their characters, focusing on characters that contain the heart symbol. The seal style of Chinese calligraphy that he employs is approximately 2,500 years old. Here it serves as a bridge between our contemporary selves and the most ancient Chinese pictures and symbols. Through stunning collage art that interprets the visual elements within each character, Young uncovers layers of emotional meaning for words such as joy and sorrow, respect and rudeness. He invites children to probe the full range of their own emotions, and gives parents, librarians, and older readers a context for discussing ethics and for examining the similarities and differences between old and new, East and West.

First published in 1997, the book is a truly unique exploration—or as Young writes, "adventure"—into the different moods, and dangers and abilities of the human heart—our emotional selves—to conjure and master, or fall victim to, the many challenges we face.

The third collaboration between Young and DaCosta tells the story of a lonely girl who finds an unlikely friend in her elderly neighbor.

Each night kids have been creeping around and spray painting houses in Tasha's neighborhood. Two days in a row, her neighbor Mrs. Lucy awakes to find graffiti outside her home. Tasha helps her paint over it. They discover that they are alike, except for their age, and become inseparable. But who keeps defacing Mrs. Lucy's house? Ed Young's inimitable cut-out art sensitively conveys the characters' emotions and the drama of the story: as the truth is discovered, the houses become multicolored, but the characters remain faceless. Then when the miscreants are revealed, Tasha's and Mrs. Lucy's faces become visible. A subtle expression of recognition on both... This nuanced story shows young readers that honesty and respect are the most important elements for friendship. With Night Shadows, Caldecott Medal-winner Ed Young's oneiric illustrations and Barbara DaCosta's introspective narrative jointly reproduce the intensity with which a child experiences solitude and companionship.

Yugen is the story of a boy remembering his mother, told in haiku and pictures, a book of longing and remembrance that is unequaled in its beauty and poetic simplicity. "Yugen" is not just a nickname for the main character, it is also a profound concept in Asian societies that points to the mystery and beauty of the universe and of human suffering. Yugen, the second collaboration between Caldecott-winning illustrator Ed Young and Mark Reibstein, after their award-winning 2008 debut, Wabi Sabi, beautifully captures a boy's sadness, but also his mindfulness and wonder.

An Interview with J. Malcolm Garcia

July 30

by Seven Stories Press

The Fruit of All My Grief: Lives in the Shadows of the American Dream

Recent posts

EXCERPT FROM CUBANTHROPY: TWO FUTURES THAT HAPPENED WHILE YOU WERE BUSY THINKING

BY IVÁN DE LA NUEZ, TRANSLATED BY ELLEN JONES

BETWEEN THE DEVIL AND THE DEEP BLUE SEA: 1990-1991

I

It starts with the suspension of the Cold War, and Cubans at the center of the conflict.

It starts with the ageing New Left invoking the sixties in order to demonstrate the rightness of Cuba choosing to go it alone outside the Soviet Bloc, and with the sprightly New Right rejecting the sixties in order to emphasize their victory over communism.

Between the devil and the deep blue sea . . .

In 1989, the old revolutionary guard looks back to the sixties to recover Cuba’s glory days.

In 1989, the new conservative guard looks back to the sixties to bad-mouth North American decadence.

II

It starts with Reagan and Bush Senior proclaiming their victory over communism and with the United States shaken up by a sense of catharsis that had to be contained as quickly as possible.

In case that wasn’t enough ammunition, there was always Reagan to confirm that leadership was indispensable; Milton Friedman to give credence to the idea that the market was invincible, and Bell himself to argue that a return of the protestant ethic was inevitable.

This time, not only the American continent but the whole world would be “for Americans."

III

IV

In that vein, there was the challenge posed by the new culture led by the sons of the Revolution, by that New Man outlined by El Che, who, as the Cold War intensified, decided to try out his very own private glasnost.

Even so, it fell to those new intellectuals to reinscribe the country into Western culture after years of the Soviet model, apparent or covert, a process facilitated by the fact that communism in Eastern Europe was to pass away.

The problem is that the Cuban government was not prepared for this ideological, aesthetic, and political avalanche that strained the foundations of its cultural policy: “Within the Revolution, everything; against the Revolution, nothing.”

Would we ever be able to effectively dismantle either world?

Perhaps it was too soon to abandon socialism, but too late to return to the Revolution.

Seven Stories’ mission includes our dedication to the radical imagination. We stand with the Palestinian people in their struggle for respect of the most basic human rights, and stand against the ongoing Israeli occupation of their homeland.

We are firmly aligned with the Palestinian Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI), put forth by Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS), and commit to the following:

- To support Palestinian voices without requiring them to partner with Israeli counterparts as an explicit or implicit condition for such support

- To abstain from any project that seeks to “normalize” the Israeli occupation of Palestine

- To abstain from collaborating with Israeli cultural and academic organizations complicit in maintaining the Israeli occupation of Palestine

- To abstain from collaborating with any organizations that receive funding from the State of Israel

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In this opening passage, the three siblings discover that a tick has attached itself to one of their bellies, and they have to find someone to help them remove it — quite difficult to do in a town where very few adults remain.

**The first book we published by Liliana Corobca, Monica Cure's translation of The Censor's Notebook (2022), won the 2023 Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize — an amazing feat considering this was Monica Cure's first full-length work of translation!

KINDERLAND

BY LILIANA COROBCA TRANSLATED BY MONICA CURE

— Hello. Would you mind taking out a tick for us?

The woman wrinkled her nose in disgust and answered:

— I don’t take out ticks.

And the woman quickly went inside the house.

The girl stopped next to the well. Maybe someone would get thirsty and come by for some water. She would stay there and wait.

Meanwhile, the youngest brother brought the other brother his favorite toy. The brother with the tick ignored him. He couldn’t care less about toys right now.

— Would you mind taking out a tick?

— Not at all. Where is it?

— There, said Cristina as she pointed toward the gate.

— Whose daughter are you?

— My dad’s Victor Dumitrache.

— Well, well, you’re Vichiuşa’s daughter? I used to give you cart rides when you were little. Back then I had a strong, sleek stallion . . . And your pa’s gone off to make long money. The girl nodded. And he left you at the mercy of the ticks. The girl nodded again.

When they saw the man come in, the two brothers went silent, forgetting to cry.

— Where are you, tick?

Then he looked at the apple.

— What, you don’t want your apple? Let’s give it to the pony, he’ll gobble it right up!

The smaller boy again handed the apple to the bigger one, who, given the choice between him or the horse eating it, decided to take the apple without saying a word. When it came down to it, the man was scarier to him than the tick.

— What, you call that a tick, boy, it’s as small as an ant! Lemme at it!

Then he said to the girl:

— Do you have brandy or odikolon?

She did, and she went to get the alcohol. She thought to herself: He wants to drink it, get drunk, and toss my brothers over the fence.

The man approached the afflicted child. He fiercely gritted his few teeth at the tick, a gesture which made the littlest one run behind the house. He poked his head out from behind a corner after a moment because he didn’t hear anything and he was curious.

In the blink of an eye, the man squeezed the swollen tick between his blackened fingernails and threw it onto the ground, looking carefully at the boy’s belly.

— I got it out, head and all, he said with satisfaction. Now step on it.

Because the boy didn’t move, he called over the little one:

— Hey, come here, little snot-nose, come look at your brother’s tick. But the little one didn’t accept the invitation either. The girl approached with a small bottle, out of which the man poured some brandy into his palm and then rubbed it onto the boy’s belly.

— Okay, you step on it, he said to the girl.

The girl conscientiously put her foot down on the bug and jumped on it a few times.

— And you say your pa’s not home.

The children nodded their heads.

The noise of the wheels could be heard for a little while, and then silence.

A NEW NARRATIVE

BY ED MORALES

I asked my dad why it said that Puerto Rico belongs to the United States. Did that mean it wasn’t its own country? “No,” he said. “Puerto Rico is a country. Puerto Rico is my country.”

BY LILIANA COROBCA
TRANSLATED BY MONICA CURE