Eliza Griswold

An eye-opening collection of clandestine poems by Afghan women Because my love's American, blisters blossom on my heart. Afghans revere poetry, particularly the high literary forms that derive from Persian or Arabic. But, the poem above is a folk couplet-a landay, an ancient oral and anonymous form created by and for mostly illiterate people: the more than 20 million Pashtun women who span the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. War, separation,...

The chairs have come in and the crisp yellow thwock of the ball being hit says somehow, now that it's fall, I'm a memory of myself. My whole old life- I mourn you sometimes in places you would have been. -October The poems in this fierce debut are an attempt to record what matters. As a reporter's dispatches, they concern themselves with different forms of desolation: what it means to feel at home in wrecked places and then to experience loneliness...

The Gifts of the State and Other Stories: Afghan Authors Under Thirty radically re-shapes our idea of Afghanistan as a place of unquestioning religiosity, brutal sexism, and anti-American and Russian resistance. Rather, employing stark naturalism, surrealistic and genre elements, these writers bravely depict western-styled women in former Russian apartments and men obsessed with fantasies based on Mickey Spillane novels.