The last time I stayed with my father in Miami over the holidays, I made the mistake of thinking he was lonely. I had a bad habit of trying to decode his emotional state from external markers, in this case his threadbare green bathmat. Part of a towel set my parents acquired when I was seven or so, it had . . .
On a rooftop of a prison in South Africa Nelson Mandela tends garden and has a birthday, as my Jamaican grandfather in Harlem, New York raises tomatoes and turns ninety-one. I have taken touch for granted: my grandfather’s hands, his shoulders, his pajamas which smell of vitamin pills… (Read the rest at Graywolf.)
“Even from the very beginning, I was interested in the ways that you love somebody and still betray them or hurt them without meaning to. You know, that kind of thing and how that works in families.” Masha Hamilton, a journalist and novelist and, until recently, the Director of Communications and Public Diplomacy at the U.S. Embassy in Afghanistan, spoke . . .