Bright Unbearable Reality: Essays

Bright Unbearable Reality: Essays

by Anna Badkhen
Bright Unbearable Reality: Essays

Bright Unbearable Reality: Essays

by Anna Badkhen

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Overview

2022 National Book Awards Longlist for Nonfiction 

Essays about migration, displacement, and the hope for connection in a time of emotional and geopolitical disruption by a Soviet-born writer and former war correspondent.


Called a “chronicler of a world on the move” by The New York Review of Books, Anna Badkhen seeks what separates and binds us at a time when one in seven people has left their birthplace, while a pandemic dictates the direst season of rupture in humankind’s remembering. Her new essay collection, Bright Unbearable Reality, comprises eleven essays set on four continents—roving everywhere from Oklahoma to Azerbaijan—and united by a common thread of communion and longing.
 
In these essays, Badkhen addresses the human condition in the era of such unprecedented dislocation, contemplates the roles of memory and wonder in how we relate to one another, and asks how we can soberly and responsibly counter despair and continue to develop—or at least imagine—an emotional vocabulary against depravity.
 
The subject throughout the collection is bright unbearable reality itself, a translation of Greek enargeia, which, says the poet Alice Oswald, is “when gods come to earth not in disguise but as themselves.”
 
Essays include:
   In “The Pandemic, Our Common Story,” which takes place in the Great Rift Valley of Ethiopia, one of the locations where humankind originated, the onset of the global pandemic catches Badkhen mid-journey, researching human dispersal 160,000 years ago and migration in modern times.
   In “How to Read the Air,” set mostly in Philadelphia, Badkhen looks to the ancient Greeks for help pondering our need for certainty at a time of racist violence, political upheaval, and environmental cataclysm.
   “Ways of Seeing” and the title essay “Bright Unbearable Reality” wrestle with complications of distance and specifically the bird’s eye view—the relationship between physical distance, understanding, and engagement.
   “Landscape with Icarus” examines how and why children go missing, while “Dark Matter” explores how violence always takes us by surprise.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781681377070
Publisher: New York Review Books
Publication date: 10/18/2022
Sold by: Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format: eBook
Pages: 192
Sales rank: 824,143
File size: 430 KB

About the Author

About The Author
Anna Badkhen was born in the Soviet Union and is now an American citizen. She is the author of six previous books of nonfiction. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Barry Lopez Visiting Writer in Ethics and Community Fellowship, and a Joel R. Seldin Award from Psychologists for Social Responsibility for writing about civilians in war zones.

Table of Contents

Preface 9

Once I Took a Weeklong Walk in the Sahara 11

The Pandemic, Our Common Story 35

How to Read the Air 57

Acts of Humanity 69

Ways of Seeing 75

Bright Unbearable Reality 85

Landscape with Icarus 100

False Passives 113

Forgiving the Unforgivable 129

Dark Matter 158

Jericho 172

Notes 185

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