Grove Press
Grove Press
Grove Press
The new issue of the acclaimed anthology from literary critic John Freeman spotlights never-before-published stories, essays, and poetry by Edwidge Danticat, Herta Müller, Juan Gabriel Vásquez, Gregory Pardlo, Kay Ryan, Aleksandar Hemon, and many more.
The third literary anthology in the series that has been called “ambitious” (Oprah Magazine) and “strikingly international” (Boston Globe), Freeman’s: Home continues to push boundaries in diversity and scope, with stunning new pieces from emerging writers and literary luminaries alike.
As the refugee crisis convulses whole swathes of the world and there are daily updates about the rise of homelessness in parts of America, the idea and meaning of home is at the forefront of many people’s minds. Viet Thanh Nguyen harks to an earlier age of displacement with a haunting piece of fiction about the middle passage made by those fleeing Vietnam after the war. Rabih Alameddine brings us back to the present, as he leaves his mother’s Beirut apartment to connect with Syrian refugees who are building a semblance of normalcy, even beauty, in the face of so much loss. Home can be a complicated place to claim, because of race–the everyday reality of which Danez Smith explores in a poem about an encounter at a bus stop–or because of other types of fraught history. Kerri Arsenault returns to her birthplace of Mexico, Maine, a paper mill boomtown turned ghost town, while Xiaolu Guo reflects on her childhood in a remote Chinese fishing village with her grandparents. Many readers and writers, meanwhile, turn to literature to find a home: Leila Aboulela tells a story of obsession with a favorite author.
Also including Thom Jones, Emily Raboteau, Rawi Hage, Barry Lopez, Herta Müller, Amira Hass, and more, writers from around the world lend their voices to the theme and what it means to build, leave, return to, lose, and love a home.
“A superb anthology: eclectic and thought-provoking.” —Kirkus Reviews
“This edition of Freeman’s manages to do what the world off the page cannot: provide a place where diversity can safely reside. A sanctuary for stories . . . Home is often the stories of others. Let these poems, shorts and stories guide you to what is your home.”—Lucy Kogler, Literary Hub, “16 books to read this April”
From “E. A hymn bracing for the end” by Adonis
Many gray hairs on my head,
but in my insides only the down of childhood.
Take away your alchemy, dear poetry, raise it, discipline it, and
teach it to
mingle our bodies with our dreams,
how time can earn a place among our days and nights,
how minutes grunt in our veins like wild horses.
In your name, I flee myself to be myself,
and in your name I become joy and sadness in one inhale
and I clamp my lips on your secrets.
From “All the Home You’ve Got” by Edwidge Danticat
As an adult at family gatherings, at mine or other people’s homes, I would sit quietly and listen to story after story of female relatives who had been asked to go to private houses, prisons, police stations, wearing their prettiest dresses to “convince” the colonel, general, foot soldier, or militia man who’d arrested their father, brother, uncle, cousin, not to kill their men.
Sometimes the price of a loved one’s release was a young female relative’s virginity. But no one spoke about any of this until our female heroines had died.
Many of the women in my family covered up being abused with piousness. They wore white clothes and wrapped their hair with white scarves. They wore no jewelry or makeup. They prayed a lot. They tried to make themselves as white as the snow we had not yet seen, as white as light itself. They tried to become invisible.
The less of you was seen the better, my aunt Denise liked to say. But it was no guarantee of protection, even in the dark, even inside your own home.
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