“Our age is a checkpoint,” writes Palestinian-American poet Fady Joudah. The photograph on this issue’s cover, taken by Alex Webb, depicts a fence in California dividing Mexico and the US . . . Our world seems ever more crowded by walls intended to keep people in or keep them out, so perhaps it is unsurprising that references to borders and border guards around the globe crop up again and again in the pages that follow . . . .

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PEN America 9: Checkpoints is now available.

Fiction

Reunion
by Xiaolu Guo

Men’s faces always appear old to me. Most of the ones who visit the karaoke parlor are ageing, with wives and children at home. They were born in the ’50s, dedicated the prime of their lives to the socialist cause. [More]

Soap and Ambergris
by Yousef Al-Mohaimeed

I live in a small, single-story house in Al-Atayef Quarter. My husband didn’t leave me anything, apart from a mud house that shakes when the thunder crashes and the rain pours. [More]

My Beirut
by Rabih Alameddine

The Nurse and the Novelist
by Anya Ulinich

Drama

A Little Explosion
by George Packer

Adnan: That is not the right translation for “capacity-building.”

Laith: Keep it simple, stupid. You think that imam with the big nose would understand what Bill Prescott was telling him?

[More]

Nonfiction

Baghdad, Damascus, Atlanta
by Ahmed Ali

Poetry

From The Butterfly's Burden
by Mahmoud Darwish
translated by Fady Joudah

They Didn't Ask: What's After Death

They didn’t ask: What’s after death? They were / memorizing the map of paradise more than the book of earth, consumed with another question: / What will we do before this death?

[More]

Shimon Adaf: Poems
by Shimon Adaf; translated by Becka Mara McKay

Proof of Kindness, Checkpoint
by Fady Joudah
 

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