by Peter Straub
First published 2014
This collection brings together fiction, poetry, and essays that examine the experience of being torn from home. The volume includes work by Peter Straub alongside other contemporary writers like Edie Meidav, Can Xue, H.G. Carrillo, Ales Steger, and Maxine Chernoff. The contributors explore different forms of displacement: political dissidents forced from their countries, spies who defect and lose their identities, princes cast out by their own fathers, entire communities scattered across the globe. The writers follow a tradition that stretches from Homer to Robert Heinlein, from Aeschylus to Camus. As Salman Rushdie observed in The Satanic Verses, exile creates an endless contradiction where people move forward while constantly looking backward, dreaming of return while envisioning revolution. These new voices and established masters capture the complexity of banishment, loss, and the persistent ache for what was left behind.
Genres: literary-fiction, anthologies, contemporary, 21st-century
Vibes: emotional, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: found-family, political-dissidents
331 pages · ebook · Conjunctions