I had made the very common mistake of thinking that marriage was a mode of absolute commonality and a breaking down of all boundaries, instead of understanding it simply as a pact between two people w...
Our final hours together were predictable: the temperature of the arguments rising, the almost comic melodrama of the play beginning. Faces, masks. One shouting, the other crying; and then, change mas...
Escritor es el que borra...Cortar, podar: encontrar una forma que ya estaba ahíPero las palabras no son plantas y, en todo caso, los jardines son para los poetas de corazón: los de corazón ajardinado....
Er zijn dingen die je alleen maar kunt begrijpen als je ze in retrospectief bekijkt, wanneer er jaren overheen gegaan zijn en het verhaal al is afgelopen. Voordat dat het geval is, en zolang het verha...
But we weren't going to risk it. I said, focus on your picture, and so you drew a girl figure and wrote Sir Fus In Love, and then said it said Sara Falls In Love. I didn't want to correct your spellin...
As if the deep fragility of the person becomes exposed in their absence, through their belongings?
The process by which a child is asked questions during the intake interview is called screening, a term that is as cynical as it is appropriate: the child a reel of footage, the translator-interpreter...
Sargasso Sea, which, the boy says, gets its name from the enormous quantities of sargassum seaweed that float there, almost motionless, trapped by currents that circle clockwise.
I read them like I had to finish an infinite bowl of lukewarm soup.
The most important thing in this life, Master Oklahoma used to say at the end of each session, is to have a destiny.
My luck was without equal, my life was a poem, and I was certain that one day, someone was going to write the beautiful tale of my dental autobiography. End of story.
I suddenly realized he probably didn’t know the difference between a noun and a verb. So I asked him. He looked up at the ceiling theatrically, and after a few seconds said yes, of course he knew: nou...
However differently we spoke the language, as Spanish speakers, our close ties with Latin and Greek gave us a sense of superiority: we were the heirs to a noble linguistic past. English, in contrast,...
But I suppose it’s always been like that. I suppose that the convenient narrative has always been to portray the nations that are systematically abused by more powerful nations as a no-man’s-land, as...
That’s the way literary recognition works, at least to a certain degree. It’s all a matter of rumor, a rumor that multiplies like a virus until it becomes a collective affinity.
More than eighty thousand undocumented children from Mexico and the Northern Triangle, but mostly from the latter, had been detained at the US southern border in just the previous six or seven months....
Impossible to know why items like these can reveal such important things about a person; and difficult to understand the sudden melancholy they produce in that person’s absence.
Writer and former Border Patrol officer Francisco Cantú has written poignantly about these death maps and all the clearly marked ghosts that dot the wide deserts in the southern United States.
When you read words like that in a book, beautiful words, a powerful but fleeting emotion ensues. And you also know that soon, it’ll all be gone: the concept you just grasped and the emotion it produc...
When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies? Perhaps to be too practical is madness. To surrender dreams—this may be madness.