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    To Remain
    The Sun InterviewBy Judith HertogTo RemainRaja Shehadeh on Living through Destruction in Palestine

    I have been thinking that people all over the world these days are feeling a sense of despair because, like me, they are seeing the destruction of the world as they knew it. But it has occurred to me that the real destruction of my world happened in 1948, when the Palestinians lost Palestine.

    Distractions
    Readers WriteBy Our ReadersDistractions

    Reading at work, listening to music during labor, swatting gnats while meditating

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David Koteen

David Koteen is a devoted father of three sons, writing and farming at the Hearthwind Community in Umpqua, Oregon.

Fiction

Kusadasi

In summer, cruise ships bring exultant droves of westerners to the town, who, along with extensive drug trafficking, have transformed the region into a wealthy, peaceful appendage to the otherwise bellicose, indigent body of Turkey. Like the thin layer of crude oil on the Mediterranean, affluence stratifies.

August 1990
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories

Blind As A Fish

Time passes and you learn that you overlooked a fairly simple and important ingredient. Yeast is necessary. The only time you’re definitely right is when it doesn’t matter. Failure and pain, twin stepping stones to knowledge.

January 1989
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories

Hannah

Just as it is difficult to picture an angel without wings, it is difficult to picture a human with wings. But more than I once considered, it seems that, under certain circumstances, the two are readily interchangeable, just as some solids will transform directly into gases.

December 1987
Fiction

Gold And Black

Then he turns to me, and direct as an arrow says, “You gonna be there?” (This, I thought, is what they refer to in books as “the moment of truth.”) My heart was creeping up my esophagus like an inchworm; but my tongue would not unwind.

October 1986
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories

Acorns

I was about to run out of meter time when an elderly gentleman approached, moving about as fast as a snail with a broken leg. He carried two large bags full of food and sundry housekeeping paraphernalia. Red-faced and puffing. I offered him a hand.

July 1985
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories

The Lucy Syndrome

The inexorable pride that haunts me, the fever of gluttony, and lust that would forego God for an ecstatic moment are the gas, grease, and oil that lubricate this Hellbent vehicle. They are tears the sperm that race up the tube; they excite and terrify but they will never, never save me.

August 1983
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories

Cholestiatoma

Cholestiatoma is a loving beast; as with other cancers, he comes like a string around the finger, a chain around the throat, to insure that we do not idly forget why we are here. Cholestiatoma (Chole when masculine, Choleste when feminine) lives in my skull between the meninges and the right orbit.

February 1983
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