Panic in a Suitcase by Yelena Akhtiorskaya

Panic in a Suitcase is the story of Ukrainian immigrants who come to the United States after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, but it would be reductive to call Yelena Akhtiorskaya’s wonderful debut a traditional immigrant novel.

Panic in a Suitcase is the story of Ukrainian immigrants who come to the United States after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, but it would be reductive to call Yelena Akhtiorskaya’s extraordinary debut a traditional immigrant novel. Historically, immigrant novels have tended to be about motion, transition, adjustment. In The Rites of Passage, anthropologist Arnold van Gennup explained major life transitions as occurring in a three-fold progression. The first stage is separation, a departure from the familiar: You leave home, are forced out of childhood, change status. The last stage describes

culture May 06, 2014

American Innovations by Rivka Galchen

Central to American Innovations, Rivka Galchen’s agile new collection, is this question: How do we keep ourselves from knowing the only thing we can truly know—that life is unavoidably marked by losses big and small until all is lost, completely and totally? With humor, each story reiterates the only plausible reality: In the end, we are alone with no answers.

Is it true that everyone remembers the day death was first explained to them? I was seven and a hamster had died. The hamster had been given to me, perhaps, so that it could die and facilitate the conversation I then had with my mother. I remember not wanting to pay too close attention to what my mother was defining for me, so I listened instead to the faint sound I heard coming from downstairs. It was my father playing a record. I strained to make out the lyrics of the song and realized that, by doing so, I could somewhat ignore the words my mother spoke. This was the first moment of what