To See Beyond
“In To See Beyond, Anna Badkhen wields language like a wide-eyed, percussive magician….The essay as a form and humans as a species need this offering.”
—Kiese Laymon
“No book I have read in recent years is more relevant to our time, more insightful, more probing, more unsparing in its analysis or more generous of heart than To See Beyond.”
—Ben Fountain
Badkhen’s prose is rich and evocative, animated by an obvious delight in the power of words to conjure faraway places and distant people, allowing us to imagine them as if we were right there with her.
— On the Seawall
A stunningly beautiful work of inquiry into what makes us human, what we can know about each other, and what makes life worth living in an increasingly dismal time.
— Boston Globe
In our time, for all time, To See Beyond is a necessary book.
— Rilla Askew, World Literature Today
Anna Badkhen is a stunning and sensitive chronicler of our collective condition. She has a rare gift. A writer whose work is both urgent and probing, and always beautiful.
—Imani Perry
What a book! It’s legendary like the legend on a map that explains things before you go walking through a desert. It’s lost and found, vulnerable, knowledgeable, plunging through millennia, to consider if a bone may also be a flute, informing me, incidentally, that the pronghorns on the ranch land where I walk my dog are related to giraffes. These are not light-hearted essays, but ones regularly astonished by what the world holds, at once.
—Eileen Myles
A truly global thinker of rare and beautiful gifts, Anna Badkhen takes us on a journey to the interior of the lyric moment: that space where understanding flashes at us, and we realize we are at home on this planet; despite all our maladies, despite our “moral dislocation,” we still have as our home “a memory of our presence, a memory of our absence.” This is a beautiful book.
—Ilya Kaminsky
Fisherman's Blues
“A community full of love and strife and humor, teenagers who die too young, women who understand life, men who tell bad jokes and believe in superstitions that come true, who pray to a kind God many of us don’t believe in or know. Their way of life is an ode to humanity, and I’m so glad Anna Badkhen, one of the most creative and important non-fiction writers in our era, has allowed us to know them.”
–James McBride
“A work of quiet genius...[Badkhen's] patient consideration of what matters most in human life is unexpectedly hopeful."
–Barry Lopez
Walking with Abel
“Lucid, generous, and rugged, Badkhen has written a magisterial book which speaks to us as a species in the early twenty-first century – where have we walked from and where are we walking.”
–J.M. Ledgard, author of Submergence
The World Is a Carpet
"Season by season, rite by rite, encounter by encounter, thread by illuminating thread, Badkhen weaves a glorious prose carpet that poignantly captures the surface and the soul of life in Oqa, and in all the Oqas that grace the loom of Afghanistan.”
–National Geographic
Afghanistan by Donkey
“If you can’t understand a country just from looking at the cities, you certainly can’t understand a war just from reading about the battles.”
–Peter Bergen, author of The Longest War
Waiting for the Taliban
A few days before I left Northern Afghanistan, I met an old man in a soiled turban sitting on his haunches on the sidewalk of Dasht-e-Shor Street in Mazar-e-Sharif, cupping a white pigeon.
“Take her,” the man said, thrusting the bird at me. I touched the pigeon’s neck with my fingertips.
Soft, weightless.
She unfolded her wings again, and I could see the marble of her underbelly.
Something seemed amiss. I looked again.
Her legs were broken.
Peace Meals
“An extraordinary mosaic built of keen observation and uncommon compassion.”
—Gina Ochsner, author of The Russian Dreambook of Color and Flight