Author: Maria Eliades

Review: İSTANBUL İSTANBUL by Burhan Sönmez, translated by Ümit Hussein
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Review: İSTANBUL İSTANBUL by Burhan Sönmez, translated by Ümit Hussein

İstanbul İstanbul Burhan Sönmez, translated by Ümit Hussein OR Books, May 2016 192 pp, $18 Buy: paperback | eBook Unlike in New York, where managing to live in the city for ten years grants one the status of being a New Yorker, rarely will you meet a person living in Istanbul who will be identified…

Mirrored Crisis: Contemporary Immigration and Atticus Lish’s PREPARATION FOR THE NEXT   LIFE
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Mirrored Crisis: Contemporary Immigration and Atticus Lish’s PREPARATION FOR THE NEXT LIFE

Most of us who now call ourselves Americans were at one point something else, or else we owe our citizenship to family members who immigrated. In the brouhaha of fear following the Paris attacks however, this has almost entirely been forgotten, adding more steps to an already long process for any refugee to enter the United States, not…

Mirrored Crisis: Post-Trauma Diaspora Memory through Jonathan Safran Foer’s EVERYTHING IS ILLUMINATED

Mirrored Crisis: Post-Trauma Diaspora Memory through Jonathan Safran Foer’s EVERYTHING IS ILLUMINATED

The aftermath of war and displacement is often a diaspora, the literal scattering of a group’s seeds far from the tree of origins. However to call that wrenching of branches, as was discussed in Part I of this series (Mirrored Crisis: What Jeffrey Eugenides’s Middlesex can show us about today’s refugee crisis) just a scattering is…

Mirrored Crisis: What Jeffrey Eugenides’s MIDDLESEX can show us about today’s refugee crisis
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Mirrored Crisis: What Jeffrey Eugenides’s MIDDLESEX can show us about today’s refugee crisis

We’ve been here before. The scenes we’ve seen and read about in the refugee crisis that has overwhelmed Eastern and Western Europe—Alan Kurdi cradled by the Turkish officer, people bearing their possessions on their backs held back by border police, and the drowned misery of the camps in Lesvos—have predecessors that we’ve forgotten, even if…