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Reverse-Gentrification of the Literary World

Akashic Books

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Tag: short fiction

“On or Off This Island” by Robert Arellano

My grandmother Fefita sits for la cena while my great-grandmother Maria Antonia cautions her on the caprices of obstetrics. Fefita is six months pregnant with her first child, my aunt Juana.

“The crying is horrible,” Doña Maria Antonia counsels her fresh-faced daughter-in-law, “but the silence is far worse.”

“The Butcher and the American” by Andrew Cotto

The American walked the ancient Italian countryside on unsteady feet. It was a familiar path, but he had been up very, very late with guests from the States, toasting to liberal optimism with liberal quantities of Tuscan wine. They had, essentially, drunk all night, waiting for election results from the States, which didn’t report until three a.m. Italian time that Barack Obama had become the forty-fourth president of the United States . . .

“Relief” by Adeola Adeniyi

On a humid mid-July Thursday evening, a young woman in a cream-colored Macy’s pantsuit went into the small bodega on Nostrand and Lexington Avenue (by the twenty-four-hour Laundromat) and walked to the back refrigerator . . .