New BR
The May/June issue of the Boston Review is available online, with articles by Akbar Ganji, Hans Blix, Catherine Tumber, and others. The issue also includes the winning short story from the annual fiction contest, which was judged this year by the excellent George Saunders: “Transitory Cities,” by Padma Viswanathan. Here’s an excerpt:
(How did he come to bear others’ homes on his back?)That question can only be answered by the one holding the strings ascending from Hram’s pivotal points, as from the joints of every bearer.
It’s not that Hram didn’t like bearing a building; he did. He received no acknowledgment—at least not from the tenants. He wouldn’t have wanted the residents of the building he bore to know that he chose where they would be when they walked out the front door of their apartment building in the morning, briefcase or tool kit or purse or newspaper in one hand, brown paper lunch bag in the other, ready to participate in maintaining the universe, their first task that of finding their way to the office or factory, which could be anywhere within their city.
Read this refreshingly imaginative story here.
