My Pen Is the Wing of a Bird: New Fiction by Afghan Women

Product Information

A collection of stories like this written by Afghan Women where we get to gain an insight into their stories and experiences are too important for a little book reviewer like me to even begin to judge. The authors are Maryam Mahjoba, Freshta Ghani, Masouma Kawsari, Fatema Haidari, Sharifa Pasun, Elahe Hosseini, Batool Haidari, Atifa Mozaffari, Anahita Gharib Nawaz, Parand, Marie Bamyani, Maliha Naji, Fatima Saadat, Farangis Elyassi, Fatema Khavari, Naeema Ghani, Zainab Aklhaqi, and Rana Zurmaty.

There is a beautiful simplicity to the prose in these stories which helps cut through to the deeper feeling and meaning in each of the stories.We use Google Analytics to see what pages are most visited, and where in the world visitors are visiting from. There are young women who yearn to go to school, widows who mourn their lost husbands and don't want to remarry, men who work as scribes for court complaints and barely make a living to get by, mothers who are separated by continents from their children, women who have been forced to immigrate to the United States and can never find the same comfort and happiness they left behind, and more.

Many thanks to the authors, translators, publisher, all those who brought this book to fruition, and NetGalley for the opportunity to read and review this book. They've been translated to English by local Afghan translators, and hence have a touch of simplicity as well as authenticity to their tone.

But a thing I experience with short story anthologies in general is that they change from new perspective to new perspective so quickly that I can sometimes struggle to maintain a connection with a character or event in each story.