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Oct 10, 2024 | 
wordswithoutborders.org | Anna Badkhen |Damion Searls |Iman Mersal |Mariana Enríquez
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Aug 23, 2024 | 
geneticliteracyproject.org | Anna Badkhen
Anna Badkhen | Aeon | August 23, 2024 Traditional medicine in a market in Antananarivo, Madagascar. Credit: Wikimedia At one point or another, we all knew something about how to heal ourselves using the plants and animals that surround us, at least somewhat. We treated pain with willow bark and terminated pregnancies with abortifacient herbs. We treated insomnia with lettuce and halitosis with parsley – according to a 10th-century cookbook from Baghdad, which devotes an entire chapter to the...
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Aug 9, 2024 | 
vqronline.org | Anna Badkhen
My boyfriend doesn’t really drink but he loves bars. He likes talking to strangers (he’s a sales executive) and he likes talking to strangers at bars; I hate talking to strangers but I like listening, and I like listening to him do it, how smoothly he runs conversations. The first time we went to New York together he took me to Red Rooster. This Red Rooster is a recent thing, named after the iconic speakeasy where he used to go before moving out of Harlem in the eighties.
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Jul 15, 2024 | 
wordswithoutborders.org | Anna Badkhen |Osama Esber |Olivia Snaije |Nina Perrotta
What is exile? A prolonged absence from one’s country imposed as a punitive measure, says Encyclopedia Britannica; from the Latin exsilium, a legal practice the Romans codified into gradations of banishment: temporary or permanent, with or without loss of citizenship or annulation of marriage, with or without confiscation of property.
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Jul 11, 2024 | 
aeon.co | Anna Badkhen
One humid afternoon, I accompanied my friend Amadou Gano to the Central Market in Mali’s capital, Bamako. Amadou needed to buy some lion fat, which he would rub on his joints, for arthritis. A decade ago, before war had swallowed up central Mali, Amadou was a tour guide and an interpreter in Djenné, a medieval trading post and religious centre a day’s drive from Bamako.
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Jul 11, 2024 | 
qoshe.com | Anna Badkhen
One humid afternoon, I accompanied my friend Amadou Gano to the Central Market in Mali’s capital, Bamako. Amadou needed to buy some lion fat, which he would rub on his joints, for arthritis. A decade ago, before war had swallowed up central Mali, Amadou was a tour guide and an interpreter in Djenné, a medieval trading post and religious centre a day’s drive from Bamako.
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Jun 26, 2024 | 
worldliteraturetoday.org | Anna Badkhen
Can we tell stories, the author asks, “in a way that makes more breathing room, that does not crush humans, not even one, not even a little girl?”Once upon a time, the story goes, in a village in the northern Chihuahuan Desert—like the ones that today crumble to clay dust on either side of the Río Grande—there was a drought that unleashed a famine so terrible, people were eating their dead. In one family, the sole survivor was a little girl. There are many versions of what happened to the girl.
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Jun 5, 2023 | 
lithub.com | Anna Badkhen
In 1986, Nora Ephron published in the New York Times an amusing essay on revision that ended in an exhortation: “Revise now, before it’s too late.” I am approximately the same age now as Ephron was then (she had gone from being a newspaper journalist to essayist to—at the time—screenplay writer; I have gone from being a newspaper journalist to nonfiction writer to—at present—a fiction writer), and, as someone who longer works on deadline, I’d like to revise Ephron’s exhortation to “Revise...
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Jun 1, 2023 | 
wordswithoutborders.org | Anna Badkhen
Anna Badkhen is the author of seven books of nonfiction, most recently Bright Unbearable Reality (NYRB), which was longlisted for the National Book Award. A Guggenheim Fellow, she is at work on a short story collection and a novel.
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May 8, 2023 | 
thecommononline.org | Anna Badkhen
Fiction, Issue 25, Issue 25 Fiction By ANNA BADKHENAs soon as I read about the albatrosses in the Times, I thought of my big sister. Natasha. “Natasha—albatross ty nasha,” Aunt Lyuba would sing in the communal kitchen, slinging blobs of wheat porridge into my bowl with the cornflower border. Each time she’d shuffle the bowl from the stove over to Natasha-and-my table, her felt slippers would catch on the peeling linoleum floor, and I’d worry about my breakfast. But Aunt Lyuba never slipped.
