When Emilio turns 16, his parents reveal a shocking secret: he is undocumented. Emilio adjusts to his new normal, until he gets into a car accident and the policeman on the scene reports him to ICE. Emilio is deported to Guatemala, but he is determined to take an epic journey home.
The Brick House is a place where people dream of love and loneliness, of the world's beauty, and of ongoing environmental degradation. In this short but moving work, travelers confront their lives in the strange, elemental language which dreams allow for, a strangeness mirrored in the accompanying illustrations by Fowzia Karimi. Inspired by Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities and following in the tradition of Armenian illuminated manuscripts, The Brick House is a delight to the eye and mind.
Here is a novel of import and style, set in 1915-1917, the years of the Ottoman Turkish government’s brutal campaign that resulted in the deaths of more than a million Armenians. Through a series of chapters that have the weight and economy of poetry, Micheline Aharonian Marcom introduces us to the stories of Anaguil, an Armenian girl taken in by Turkish neighbors after the death of her parents who now views the remains of her world through a Muslim veil; Sargis, a poet hidden away in his mother’s attic, dressed in women’s clothing, and steadily going mad; Lucine, a servant and lover of the American consul; Maritsa, a rage-filled Muslim wife who becomes a whore; and Dickran, an infant left behind under a tree on the long exodus from an Armenian village, who reaches with tiny hands to touch the stars and dies with his name unrecorded. Through these lives, we witness the vanishing of a people.
Three Apples Fell From Heaven is an elegy to the final days of Orientalism and an elegant memorial to the victims of the twentieth century’s first genocide. Together, the stories of these lives form a narrative mosaic—faceted, complex, richly textured, a devastating tableau.
Micheline Marcom describes her newest novel, A Brief History of Yes—her first since 2008's scathing and erotic The Mirror in the Well—as a "literary fado," referring to a style of Portuguese music that, akin to the American blues, is often melancholic and soulful, and encapsulates the feeling of saudade—meaning, loosely, yearning and nostalgia for something or someone irreparably lost. A Brief History of Yes tells the story of the break-up between a Portuguese woman named Maria and an unnamed American man: it is a collage-like, fragmentary novel whose form perfectly captures the workings of attraction and grief, proving once again that American literature has no better poet of love and loss than Micheline Aharonian Marcom.
