A child who becomes an unwilling accomplice to a parent’s infidelity, a young woman who is ostracized for questioning her village’s traditional methods of childbirth, and a fugitive ex-boyfriend who’s wanted for poisoning and then threatens a new family are the drivers of drama in our three fiction Top Five Stories of the Week for 2020–2021. Our top two nonfiction works are an essay reflecting on a marriage collapsed under the pressure of American xenophobia and a memoir of young man’s miraculous journey of self-discovery while lost in Mongolia’s rolling plains. We hope you’ll take as much pleasure as we have in these beautiful works.
Natasha Ayaz
Little White Birds
I began to look for evidence of my father’s duplicity in his body.
Daniel Chernin
In Search of Inner Mongolia
“I want to stay in real yurts,” I said, “not yurts for Westerners.”
Anna Ferrandou Sawyer
The Forest Path
Half the women around here have a husband in some kind of fix.
Sandra Sidi
The Bridge
We were unprepared for how hard life would be as a couple in America.
Tryphena L. Yeboah
If the Body Makes a Sound
2021 Narrative Prize Winner
