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, homeland, love--these are the subjects of "landays," which are brutal and spare, can be remixed like rap, and are powerful in that they make no attempts to be literary. From Facebook to drone strikes to the songs of the ancient caravans that first brought these poems to Afghanistan thousands of years ago, "landays" reflect contemporary Pashtun life and the impact of three decades of war. With the U.S. withdrawal in 2014 looming, these are the voices of protest most at risk of being lost when the Americans leave.
After learning the story of a teenage girl who was forbidden to write poems and set herself on fire in protest, the poet Eliza Griswold and the photographer Seamus Murphy journeyed to Afghanistan to learn about these women and to collect their "landays." The poems gathered in "I Am the Beggar of the World" express a collective rage, a lament, a filthy joke, a love of homeland, an aching longing, a call to arms, all of which belie any facile image of a Pashtun woman as nothing but a mute ghost beneath a blue burqa.

Winner of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction 'At heart a David and Goliath story fit for the movies ... [A] valuable, discomforting book' The New York Times Book Review Seven years in the making, Amity and Prosperity tells the story of the energy boom's impact on a small town at the edge of Appalachia and of one woman's transformation from a struggling single parent to an unlikely activist. Stacey Haney is a local nurse working hard to raise two kids and keep up her small farm when the fracking boom comes to her hometown of Amity, Pennsylvania. Intrigued by reports of lucrative natural gas leases in her neighbours' mailboxes, she strikes a deal with a Texas-based energy company. Soon trucks begin rumbling past her small farm, a fenced-off drill site rises on an adjacent hilltop, and domestic animals and pets start to die. When mysterious sicknesses begin to afflict her children, she appeals to the company for help. Its representatives insist that nothing is wrong. Alarmed by her children's illnesses, Haney joins with neighbours and a committed husband-and-wife legal team to investigate what's really in the water and air. Against local opposition, Haney and her allies doggedly pursue their case in court and begin to expose the damage that's being done to the land her family has lived on for centuries. Drawing on seven years of immersive reporting, prizewinning poet and journalist Eliza Griswold reveals what happens when an imperilled town faces a crisis of values, and a family wagers everything on an improbable quest for justice.

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 and dislocation in the familiar. The collection arcs between internal and external worlds--the disappointment of returning, the guilt and thrill of departure, unexpected encounters in blighted places-- and, with ruthless observations etched in the sparest lines, the poems in "Wideawake Field "sharply and movingly navigate the poles of home and away.

"The Gifts of the State and Other Stories: New Writing from Afghanistan" radically reshapes our idea of Afghanistan as a place of unquestioning religiosity, brutal sexism, and anti-American and Russian resistance. Rather, employing stark naturalism and 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.

"Though it is set in a place we think we know (Afghanistan), this continuously startling and often very moving book opens up a new country, a fresh and diverse landscape of human striving and disappointment. With grace, melancholy and wit, it describes the joys and sadnesses of ordinary life obscured by the last decade of shrill headlines. Everyone should read it."--Pankaj Mishra

"Very little of what is written in English can describe the grip of Afghanistan's "normal emergency" as can these beautiful, remarkable stories. They are heartbreaking and violent tales, excerpts from the minds of orphans who mourn not so much mere parents as ancestry itself - the ancestry of history and wisdom - and there is rarely any redemption to the grief save only the lyricism of storytelling. But this lyricism is rich, one that brings into fluid English the poignant harmonies of other literatures and tongues, and it carries with it a faith greater than those of warring forces." --Rana Dasgupta, author of "Tokyo Canceled" and "Solo"

"I was extremely impressed by this collection of stories by Afghan writers under thirty. From the elemental simplicity of Abdul Shakoor Jawad's story of retribution and reconciliation, 'The Hasher', to the acid wit of Hosai Wardak's exposure of collective mysogyny, 'Ice Cream', to the complex horrors of Khalid Ahmad Atif's extraordinary war story, 'The Sea Floor', the work on display here is not only gripping and beautifully executed, but also possessed of a rare cultural and political urgency. I recommend it very highly."--James Lasdun

Adam Klein is the author of story collection "The Medicine Burns," the novel "Tiny Ladies," and the artist monograph "Jerome: After the Pageant." His work has appeared in "Bomb," the "New York Times At War Blog," and the "Huffington Post."