Online Exclusive: “Hands Chopping Air”: on teaching ESL in Manhattan’s Chinatown. An essay by Rachel Aydt.
“In winter, the ubiquitous American elm trees are bare and the anemic playgrounds of these projects are empty; the concrete of the buildings appears heavy against the gray skies…. “And yet, in these cold public spaces, the neighborhood rises into life each day as my son, Jamie, and I make our way to school. The...
From Our Pages: “The Jersey in Me,” by Alan Cheuse.
A bridge closes and a writer’s gorge rises. “I’ve learned from painful experience that the heat of Jersey anger never goes out, not when stoked by some unkind word or gesture from stranger or supposed friend. Or a traffic incident.” The bridge in question, which is the nation’s busiest. Read about the closing in the New...
From Our Pages: “Holy War: Ramadan and race riots in Senegal,” by Patricia Smith.
BROAD STREET presents this essay (recipient of a Special Mention from the Pushcart editors) from our “Hunt, Gather” issue (fall/winter 2014) … Here’s what happened during one holy season when Patricia Smith, a Fulbright scholar in Senegal, found a sudden war erupting in the small village where she’d been teaching high schoolers and immersing herself in the...
“In Defiance of Genre: on Octavia Butler,” by Jamal Stone.
by Jamal Stone Kindred, Octavia Butler’s 1979 best-seller, defies genre conventions. It is an intensely emotional novel that blends elements of sci-fi time travel with an antebellum first-person slave narrative. The novel takes African American protagonist Dana back to slave times at seemingly random intervals, leaving her to survive in a cruel world as she tries...
