Afghanistan Archives

‘Kabul’ by Fatima Bhutto, ZYZZYVA No. 107, Fall Issue

by me

October 5, 2016

Posted on October 5, 2016 (October 7, 2016) by me

Fatima Bhutto, photo by Paul Wetherell

Fatima Bhutto is the author of several books, including the memoir Songs of Blood and Sword (Nation Books) and the novel The Shadow of the Crescent Moon (Penguin Press). Her work has also appeared in the New Statesmen, the Daily Beast, the Guardian, and other publications. She lives in Karachi, Pakistan.

Her story “Kabul” appears in the Fall issue. The tale of Sheryar, a feckless young man, and Soraya, his pregnant—and even younger—lover, Bhutto’s story casts a cold (though not unsympathetic) eye on people trapped by circumstances seemingly beyond their power to change. The following is an excerpt from her story, but it can be read in full in our Fall issue, which you can order here.

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Brother’s Keeper: T. Geronimo Johnson’s ‘Hold It ‘Til It Hurts’

by Lucy Schiller

October 10, 2012

Posted on October 10, 2012 (October 9, 2012) by editor

Upon bringing home his newly adopted son, who is black, to his other son, Achilles (also adopted, also black), the white father in T. Geronimo Johnson’s Hold It ‘Til It Hurts (Coffee House Press, 342 pages) announces, “Don’t need blood to be brothers.” Johnson’s violent first novel, though, effectively proves the opposite, but in a different sense: tearing through Afghanistan and Hurricane Katrina, the morgues of Atlanta and the stilted subdivisions of Maryland, Achilles Conroy finds familial love in the most harrowing situations. If Achilles’s younger brother, Troy, is “fearless and light, like a rock that floats,” Achilles is an […]