It was a legal lynching which smears with blood a whole nation. By killing the Rosenbergs, you have quite simply tried to halt the progress of science by human sacrifice. Magic, witch-hunts, autos-da-fé, sacrifices—we are here getting to the point: your country is...
The United Press work room at the Nuremberg Trials. Source: The National Archives and Records Administration via the Courtroom 600 project. Editor’s Note: At the end of this story is an audio recording of the author discussing how, among other things, her father...
At sundown, we would go for walks along the road that went from the airmen’s quarters toward Central School. It was a quiet road back then, when we lived there for a brief while in 1971. The streetlights beside the road would have just been lit, a chill in the air as...
Photo courtesy of Evelyn Symes The day Glenn left for Vietnam, our large extended family drove to the airport in a procession of five ancient Fords and Uncle Eben’s 1958 Cadillac. Mother filled the air in our car with empty admonitions to Glenn about laundry, diet,...
All things which areoutside lovecome to me now—This view and the old woman’s understandingof it, asking to liveone more year, one more yearone more generation, two generations, three,one more eternity. —Leah Goldberg, “In Jerusalem’s Hills” Erna’s sunglasses...
Bobby Ulili, Digital Sketch, 11.7” x 16.5” Through the window of the inn, Mathew could see the shadow of Rheinsberg Palace over the lake and a purple ribbon of sky dusted with stars. He drank a weissbier from a tall glass and ate blood sausage with sauerkraut. The...
The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.—Samuel Beckett, Murphy It’s obscene the way she cleaned up. It was a mess. I was a mess. Covered, I was. And she came and, I swear to God, when she finished, there was nothing left. All traces were gone. I kept...
A little over two years after he’d enlisted, Allen was back from Iraq and back with Lawn Island Landscaping. If I’d been scared of Allen before, I was terrified of him now. It wasn’t what Allen did that was frightening; it was more what he didn’t do. The first week he...
I once taught a course called Literature of War at a small community college shortly before the first Iraq war. One assignment I gave was to interview someone who had been in a war about their experiences. For most of my students that would have been a father or...
Editor’s Note: This story is an excerpt from a novel-in-progress. In the dark of the hall, Faraaz watches his brothers Manzoor and Adil alternately going to the toilet. It’s okay. They’ll tell when they’re ready. You can’t expect fifteen- and thirteen-year-old boys to...
