valeria luiselli Archive

Fact and Fiction in Tell Me How It Ends and Lost Children Archive

Reading both of Valeria Luiselli’s most recent books, which each center on the refugee crisis at the US-Mexico border, is a powerful experience—doing so can show us our own complicity in what is often a “background story.”

Review: TELL ME HOW IT ENDS: AN ESSAY IN 40 QUESTIONS by Valeria Luiselli

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In her expanded essay Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions, Luiselli outlines the intake form for undocumented minors. The procedure, on paper, is simple: Luiselli presents the questions, the children speak, and Luiselli transcribes their answers in English for the lawyers who will fight to

The Year In Humor

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2015 was an awful, depressing year for current events. The violence was so widespread that to reduce it to a single sentence like this is to vastly undermine the scale and gravitas of human suffering endured. With California out of water and the unsettling winter heat wave currently afflicting

How Should A Writer Be?

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Yesterday on the bus I sat behind a woman whose toddler was having a Richter-ten tantrum concerning his left shoe. He flung himself out of his seat, flailed his arms, pulled his mother’s hair, and wept into his shirt because he didn’t want to wear his shoe. This lasted