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    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.

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

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Frederick Reiken

Frederick Reiken is the author of three novels, most recently Day for Night, which was a finalist for the 2010 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in fiction. He lives with his wife and two daughters in western Massachusetts, where he’s the coach of his five-year-old’s soccer team. He teaches creative writing at Emerson College and will be the writer-in-residence at the Nether­lands Institute for Advanced Study in 2014.

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Essays, Memoirs & True Stories

Arcadia

But there’s a force that pulls with quiet, steady gravity; a single force that doesn’t go away, no matter where I am or what I’m doing. It seems primordial. I suspect it has something to do with love. Or that it is, precisely, love. Whatever name one wants to give it, it is the force that trumps all else, the force that causes me to wish to be right here, just as I am, forever, watching my daughter as she makes another valentine.

December 2013
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