by Preeta Samarasan
On July 14th, the Prime Minister and First Lady of Malaysia had a private audience with Queen Elizabeth at Buckingham Palace. The Prime Minister, Najib Razak, wore a dark suit; the First Lady, Rosmah Mansor, wore a pale blue baju kebaya, a traditional Malay women’s garment that harks back to a time before Malay culture was as heavily Islamised/Arabised as it is today. The Queen herself wore a daffodil yellow dress. In the room, there were at least two vases full of yellow flowers, perhaps more.
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by Nania Lee
I’ve recently gotten into the habit of tuning into AM radio while getting ready in the morning — sometimes listening specifically for the news; other times just enjoying the voices and occasional musical interludes that make for relaxing background noise. The other day, to my initial delight, I heard a guy mention one of my favorite literary protagonists: Emma Bovary, passionate and tempestuous heroine in Gustave Flaubert’s mid-19th century classic, Madame Bovary. But as the young man on the radio continued, it appeared that he didn’t share my admiration–instead calling Emma Bovary a “heartless, superficial (_insert your favorite expletive_),” who deserved to “burn in hell for her selfishness.” Zoinks! Now, everyone is entitled to their opinion, but this guy seemed a little too riled up. Let’s be honest, Emma was no angel, but the woman had her reasons.
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fiction by Karen Heuler
Truly the most astonishing thing happened when that new employee Mindy walked into the meeting wearing Paulina’s hair.
Paulina’s hands immediately went up to her head. Bald. Maybe a little patch of stubble.
Paulina gasped, but her coworkers at the meeting smiled a bland welcome to Mindy. Couldn’t they see what had happened?
Paulina’s hands began to shake in anger. Her pencils had been disappearing, even her scotch tape. And now this!
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nonfiction by Joanna Brooks
So there I was: a Mormon girl in Republican Orange County during the Reagan years of the Cold War, watching the jets and helicopters traverse the skies over the orange groves, witnessing with my bodily and spiritual eyes the last hurrah of the Southern California military-industrial complex.
“You see,” my mother would say, standing by the swimming pool, pointing out all the strategic targets within a few miles of our house—south across the groves to El Toro Marine Base, then west across the asparagus and strawberry fields to John Wayne Airport, and the two massive concrete blimp hangars at the Tustin Marine Corps Air Station—“They’ll drop the bombs right on top of us.”
“We’ll be fine,” she says, her eyes on the horizon. “We’ll be gone in the twinkling of an eye.”
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Joanna Brooks on the Mormon apocalypse, Amy Butcher on living with juvenile rheumatoid arthritis, Bryon Edwards and Jeffrey Meyers on Paul and Jane Bowles, Roger Porter on the return of the exile, William Miller on losing it, Pearl Abraham on Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Molly Patterson on culture, language, and belonging.
Poetry by Thomas Lynch, Theodore Worozbyt, G. C. Waldrep, Janet Kauffman, and Georges Perros.
Fiction by Kathy Flann and Karen Heuler.
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