The Hunger Games
“No Names” play the hunger games (not movie stars, not athletes, nor heroic challengers). Forget about Hollywood and its glam girl/glam guy health club figures, who can hurl spears, throw knives, shoot...
View ArticleRandom Intimacies
On the weekend at my favorite coffee shop, I would see the same woman working, who greeted me with a smile and some friendly comment. She didn’t know my name. I didn’t know hers. She became a fixture...
View ArticleShadows
SHADOWS We wander the ghost lanes of our lost souls, coat collars turned up against the blistering cold. There is nothing left to gamble. All bets were off, for us, a long time ago. Time is all that’s...
View ArticleLove Equation
FULL MOON, LOONEY TUNES Only artists or hermits or monks choose poverty, any other social theory is baloney. Wine, women and song cost little; studio space next to nothing if you live in a ghetto. A...
View ArticleThe Magic City
“The Magic City” The steel mills of Gary Indiana, the narrow crowded streets, the grit, grime, ash heaps, crime, the money! – my uncle John was a plant foreman. I moved in with him and my aunt Ann when...
View ArticleArticle 0
CORA A siren startles her. Police? Fire? Waking up from sleep Cora thinks: “It’s hard. It’s hard.” Life is hard. Dealing with each day is hard. And it’s a long wait for anything to celebrate. “God’s...
View ArticleOh Calcutta!
Crumbling heritage buildings, a communist legacy, buses and automobiles from the 1950s…It’s no wonder that some call you the Havana of India. For more than 30 years, the ‘City of Joy’ stood still and...
View ArticleAftermath of the Nepal Earthquake
The world greeted the news about Saturday’s earthquake in Nepal, which measured 7.8 on the Richter scale and claimed more than 2000 lives (and destroyed cultural treasures in the Kathmandu Valley),...
View ArticleRussian hospitality needs to be experienced to be believed
A family I once knew in Sakhalin (an island in the Russian Pacific Coast) spoke to me about the first time they hosted a couple of foreign business associates for dinner. This was in the late 1990s...
View ArticleImmigration is not a crime
I am fortunate enough to live in a country that has made rapid strides in poverty alleviation over the last few decades, and if I wanted to move out of India, the reasons would be no different from why...
View ArticleConstant is the Rain
Praise for Constant is the Rain “Relentless pessimism about the state of the nation infuses Sexton’s … accomplished poetry and short fiction … The title piece, about hard life and untimely death in the...
View ArticleHow Alexander Pushkin used fairy tales to deal with a lack of free speech
June 6 is Alexander Pushkin’s birth anniversary. This article looks at how Pushkin used fairy tales to make political points. As well as being recognized as a great writer during his lifetime,...
View ArticleThe Lady and the Tramp
RECOGNITIONS Candles and shadows, whispers and echoes, windows and mirrors, lit by the moon’s glow; and on the card table, the hand that life dealt you. Win or lose, living’s a gamble. If you came from...
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