All Borderlands Are Ghost Lands

WATCHING TELEVISION FOOTAGE OF REFUGEES streaming west by their thousands, along the highways of Hungary toward the Austrian border, my first thoughts are about my mother. She made a similar trek, 69 years ago almost to the day, when she was only six. I see her in the girl raised by her father above the fray at the Bicske railway station in Budapest, or holding tight onto her mother’s hand in the throngs filling a nighttime road, led by men using their cellphone GPS to find the way. She too was fleeing war — or more exactly, walking through the heart of it, as what had been the Indian Raj was violently split into India and Pakistan.

Read the full article over at the Los Angeles Review of Books.

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Reading The Byword in Crete…

It’s a rare event when a major new literary magazine comes out of India, and rarer still that one of such scope and deep seriousness as The Byword emerges. But here it is, and to me it is a real cause for celebration. If you’re in India, run out to your local bookstore and see if you can get a copy, and if they don’t have one, tell them to order it. I’m proud to say I’ve got a major new story, “Jerusalem”, in the debut issue, but there’s so much else besides, and much of it fantastic. Finally, in India, a print venue where not only new writing is published, but also celebrated.byword

A traveler to Ladakh…

Back in 2011, when I was stuck in New Delhi and didn’t know what to do with myself, I decided to take a trip to Ladakh for the summer. Little did I know the journey itself would be as wild as anything I found when I reached the ancient Himalayan kingdom. Over at Terrain.org, I tell the story of that sometimes harrowing journey. One day maybe I’ll tell the story of all that happened when I finally arrived. Read it here.Screen Shot 2015-06-21 at 3.45.11 PM

Samrari, India, 2011

Happy to report, the fine people at F-Stop Magazine have published several of my “Samrari, India” photographs in their current group exhibition. The issue is dedicated to black and white photography. Check them out here — and check out the other fantastic work too.

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Launch of The Happy Hypocrite, Issue 6

Launch of The Happy Hypocrite – Freedom, Issue 6
edited by Lynne Tillman

21 September 2013, 7.00pm onwards

Artists Space
55 Walker Street
New York
NY 10013

Readings by:
Yasmine El Rashidi
Ranbir Singh Sidhu
Robin Coste Lewis
Sarah Resnick

Followed by a discussion with Lynne Tillman and participants.

To purchase this title please visit the Book Works website.

This new issue of The Happy Hypocrite challenges the restraining notions found in art and writing about who and what can and cannot speak. What can and cannot be said or thought. In part a response to Kafka – to that which we don’t know has damaged us – freedom is presented as an important and urgent concept, and a complicated word, in which and beside which hypocrisy also resides. (Hypocrisy can be construed as a freedom). The Happy Hypocrite offers its pages to ingenious fictional, nonfictional, and visual responses to the various meanings of ‘freedom’.

Contributions from Gregg Bordowitz, Paul Chan, Gabriel Coxhead, Lydia Davis, Yasmine El Rashidi, Chloé Cooper Jones, James Jennings, Allison Katz, Robin Coste Lewis, Craig Owens, Sarah Resnick, Ranbir Singh Sidhu, Abdellah Taïa, an interview between Lynne Tillman and Thomas Keenan, a cover by Susan Hiller, and archival material from Paranoids Anonymous Newsletter.

The Ghosts of Omonia Square

This just up at The Margins, with photos, one last dispatch from Athens, this time with hookers, junkies, immigrants, and cops.

At night, the junkies take over the square. They are almost vaporously thin, like the dead even before they shoot up. They have ruined most of their veins and bend forward to stick the needle in the backs of their knees or other parts of their legs. The happy ones are curled up fetally, oblivious to everything. A tall South Asian man with a tense, fierce face asks me several nights in a row if I want anything. “Hash? Junk? Anything?”

Read the whole story here.