You, he continued, grabbing my wrist. All of you, from the safe world, with your air bags and your tamper-proof packaging and your fat-free diets. You are the superstitious ones. You convince yourself...
Women without their own drivers could get around only at the whim of husbands and sons. Some
What was it Dante wrote, about the pope who abdicated his throne to become a contemplative and yet is condemned to one of the lowest circles of hell? Something about being punished for having turned h...
We will need to give you a Muslim name…does Leila suit you? I don’t deserve this kindness, she whispered. That you, Muslims, should help a Jew— Come now! Serif said, realizing that she was about to cr...
To lessen or destroy sexual pleasure is to lessen temptation; a fallback in case the religious injunctions on veiling and seclusion somehow fail to do the job.
This was no coincidence. The best short stories and the most successful jokes have a lot in common. Each form relies on suggestion and economy. Characters have to be drawn in a few deft strokes. There...
This is the cathedral. Neo-Gothic. They had midnight Mass there last Christmas, but they held it at noon because, of course, no one went out at night at that time unless they were suicidal. On its lef...
They threw rotten fruit at me and told me next time it would be acid.
The word for mother, umm, is the root of the words for source, nation, mercy, first principle, rich harvest; stupid, illiterate, parasite, weak of character, without opinion. In
The old man was appalled by the prospect of women driving. He clapped a bony hand to his heart and gazed heavenward: I hope I never see it in my lifetime, he said.
The king and queen are preparing an expulsion order— David sucked in his breath. Yes, even as we have feared. They have taken the capitulation of Granada as a sign of divine will that Spain be a Chris...
The heat of late afternoon closed in around us like an animate thing; you could feel it on your skin, warm and moist, like a great beast panting. The air was so dense it seemed to require a huge effor...
The cottage was set hard into the side of the hill, crouching before the winter winds that roared across the moors. It announced itself by smell long before you could catch sight of it. Sometimes sick...
The brave man, the real hero, quakes with terror, sweats, feels his very bowels betray him, and in spite of this moves forward to do the act he dreads.
Suicide and sexual diseases. Two great killers of the Viennese, from the highest born to the lowest.
My mother, my grandmother and my great-grandmother all told me it was right, that without it a woman wouldn’t be able to control herself, that she would end up a prostitute, said Aset, a beautiful twe...
It was only then that I realized the distance between uncle and nephew wasn’t nearly as great as I’d assumed.
Is it ever thus, at the end of things? Does any woman ever count the grains of her harvest and say: Good enough? Or does one always think of what more one might have laid in, had the labor been harder...
If Islamic countries can’t come up with their own principles for women’s competition, she said in one widely reported speech, then the way dictated by Western oppressing countries will be imposed on u...
I borrowed his brightness and used it to see my way, and then gradually, from the habit of looking at the world as he illuminated it, the light in my own mind rekindled.