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From Dinaw Mengestu, “How to Read the Air”

While it was common even among the most disciplined teachers to allow for small fabrications, from the beginning the stories I told my students existed on a more ambitious plane. Now when asked for...

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From “How to Read the Air”

Those who came seeking help often did so with a faint trace of shame hovering over them–the sense that they were once again pleading to someone to grant them a right that everyone else they passed on...

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From “How to Read the Air”

There were vast swathes of my life that I knew if I looked at closely I would come to regret, and I was certain that soon enough I was going to find the time to do that.

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From “How to Read the Air”

I could never have asked him what exactly Abrahim had done for him, or what their relationship had been like, but I had never asked him anything to begin with, not about his past, his current...

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“No, Where Are You Really From?”: Dinaw Mengestu’s Novel of Ethiopians in...

Dinaw Mengestu’s 2010 How to Read the Air tells two parallel stories: In alternating chapters, Jonas Woldemariam retells the story of his Ethiopian immigrant parents’ ill-fated road trip through the...

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From Dinaw Mengestu, “The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears”

Lying on the grass on the edge of Dupont Circle, away from the shade cast by the office buildings and trees, I listen closely to the sirens. They don’t fit in with the picturesque scene of office...

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From “The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears”

When the train rushes above ground, we’ve already crossed into the outskirts of the city. The buildings, old brick factories and warehouses, are all marked with the familiar bright red and yellow...

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From “The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears”

She was sitting on the top of her steps, bundled up in a coat, smoking a cigarette whose smell cut straight through the cold emptiness of the air.“I thought you had quit smoking a long time ago,” I...

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Leaving Addis, Losing DC: Dinaw Mengestu’s “Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears”

I can’t remember the last time I read a novel where I was the villain.The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears is a novel about the thwarted romance between a failing shopkeeper from Ethiopia and a white...

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