Pages (PDF): 177
Publisher: The Long Story
Purchase includes: PDF

IN THIS ISSUE

In E.C. Alvarez’s  “The Immigrant” Juan Diego Garcia, the fourteen-year-old protagonist, is smart, resourceful and faithful (especially to his mother). He has to be, for  after his parents were deported back to Mexico, he has to survive on the streets alone. §  “A Lesser Love” by Dan Malakoff offers a powerful and unsettling look into the life of a South American guerrilla who becomes torn between love and his duty to the revolution. §  “Drought” by Carol Wade Lundberg follows Ray Morrison, a lonely widower and retired high school biology teacher and father who is estranged from his children, especially his son. There is a drought at the nearby estuary where he used to collect biological and botanical specimens with his son: its condition is an objective correlative of his mind. Then meeting a former student who asks him for advice to deal with her son gives him an insight into his own life. §  Howard Winn’s  “Boxcar Beginnings” is set in the time of the Great Depression and delineates the unlikely friendship between Libby, the daughter of the owner of a brickyard, and Greg, the half-black son of a truck driver at the brickyard. § In “Bea and Bruce” by Ann S. Epstein an English woman meets a Canadian soldier during World War II and quickly marries him. When the war is over she finds herself filled with doubts on the ship that is taking her and many other war brides to Canada. § Rayyan Al-Shawaf’s “Who You Are” is set in Beruit, Lebanon in the 1980s during the civil war and the Israeli invasion. Bassam, the narrator Rushdie’s friend, grew up in a Christian orphanage and has an aversion to romantic love. It is a dangerous time to believe “you’re either my brother in religion or an equal in creation,” but Bassam does the decent thing when he helps a wounded soldier found on a street in Beruit and is prepared for the consequences. § Stella, the narrator in Alison  Katon’s “Walking to the Bright Land” grows up on an Oklahoma farm and dreams of going to college and then into the wider world, but her father puts obstacles in her way. Sixty years later she remembers her early struggles. § “My Dearest Brother” by William Small is about a brother and sister who were very close as children, but now as a college-aged young man Ellis has to confront and try to help his artistic sister Ansley, who has become mentally ill. § Poems by Laurel Speer, Paul Nelson and William Davey, and an editorial Prelude on Matthew Arnold’s touchstones and their relevance to today round out the issue.