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Bright Unbearable Reality

Essays

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Bright Unbearable Reality

By: Anna Badkhen
Narrated by: Anna Badkhen
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About this listen

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 11 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.

©2022 Anna Badkhen (P)2022 Audible, Inc.
Emigration & Immigration Travel Writing & Commentary Words, Language & Grammar Writing & Publishing Nonfiction
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Stories that banish our blind spots

Badkhen documents her realitites by highlighting the micro pardons and connections the macro seems to take away from it. She has written stories from the corners of the world we refuse to bring to the table to entice honest dialogue over the existential and real human crises. Her words give individual environments and persons a stage to say 'it is so' and deals with moments between the melancholy and madness around topics such as refugees, migration, war, poverty, famine and abuse. By capturing the beauty around the revolt or anguish, she makwsure she never diminishes what's ahead for the company she spends time in.

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