Genre: Fiction

1.

The one memory from my childhood that stands out, unimpaired, is a forewarning of what would later happen.

Our life was simple, ending where the village ended, framed by the woods, the road leading into town, and the orchards …

Thin is in again, Georgia said when the boys left the table. When she said it, she leaned into J and let the words fall soft in the air, as though it were a secret. 

It was never out. 

It …

[The abject] is simply a frontier, a repulsive gift that the Other, having become alter ego, drops so that the “I” does not disappear in it but finds, in that sublime alienation, a forfeited existence.

—Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: …

Let’s take a moment to talk about Nnamdi Odimegwu, whose father when he was alive was called Jonas Odimegwu—a man full of himself and full of life, who stayed mostly at home on weekdays, went out in the evenings to …

Estella Deng wrapped herself in a sea-green scarf and began to doodle on the page of bullet points before her—the beginnings of a royal blue star. She detailed its countless rays, luminosities. Because that’s what you are, her inner …

The son is in the parlor now, which the mother has begun to call the living room because they are alive after all, well, but for the father. As the boy slept upstairs, the mother and the father sometimes made …

They hadn’t been to this part of Connecticut in forty years, not since their undergrad days after the war. The geography looked different from the car window: the hills flatter, the river thinner, the clouds stringy when once they had …

He doesn’t lock the mask every rehearsal. There are some days I say, I can’t, not today, not for all those hours. Attached to the mask is a rope that sways down my back and dangling from the rope …

PROLOGUE

Anton de Kom (1898–1945) was a Surinamese political activist and author of the 1934 book We Slaves of Suriname, the first decolonial account of the nation’s history. He lived in The Hague and was married to Petronella Borsboom, …