The third literary anthology in the series that has been called
"ambitious" (O Magazine) and "strikingly international" (Boston
Globe), Freeman's: Home, continues to push boundaries in diversity
and scope, with stunning new pieces from emerging writers and literary
luminaries alike.
As the refugee crisis continues to convulse whole swathes of the world
and there are daily updates about the rise of homelessness in different
parts of America, the idea and meaning of home is at the forefront of
many people's minds. Viet Thanh Nguyen harks to an earlier age of
displacement with a haunting piece of fiction about the middle passage
made by those fleeing Vietnam after the war. Rabih Alameddine brings us
back to the present, as he leaves his mother's Beirut apartment to
connect with Syrian refugees who are building a semblance of normalcy,
and even beauty, in the face of so much loss. Home can be a complicated
place to claim, because of race--the everyday reality of which Danez
Smith explores in a poem about a chance encounter at a bus stop--or
because of other types of fraught history. In "Vacationland," Kerri
Arsenault returns to her birthplace of Mexico, Maine, a paper mill
boomtown turned ghost town, while Xiaolu Guo reflects on her childhood
in a remote Chinese fishing village with grandparents who married across
a cultural divide. Many readers and writers turn to literature to find a
home: Leila Aboulela tells a story of obsession with a favorite author.
Also including Thom Jones, Emily Raboteau, Rawi Hage, Barry Lopez, Herta
Müller, Amira Hass, and more--writers from around the world lend their
voices to the theme and what it means to build, leave, return to, lose,
and love a home.
