It was Iskra’s first day on the job, and Miles, the owner of Three Rivers Pharmacy, was giving her a tour of the register.
“Smaller bills go here,” he said, indicating the slots for ones, fives, tens, twenties, and fifties, “but Benjamins go underneath.” He lifted the cash tray. “Not that we get many in this neighborhood.”
“Benjamins?” Iskra said.
“Hundreds.”
By ADMIR SKODO
After three outbursts of fury at work, my supervisor told me I had to see a counselor or face serious disciplinary action. Or worse. Worse, worse what? Lose my job? Police involvement? I don’t know, because it never got to that. “Lucky, you’re lucky. This time.”
Restless Books is honored to hold the eleventh year of what is now known as the Kellman Prize for Immigrant Literature. By seeking outstanding work by immigrant writers, the prize amplifies immigrant voices and invites readers to contemplate the myriad ways in which migration shapes our lives, vitalizes our communities, and connects our world.
The 2026 Kellman Prize for Immigrant Literature was judged by Terry Hong, Ilan Stavans, and Anderson Tepper; the winner will be announced by LitHub on December 1. Please join us in celebrating the work of the following four finalists, and in holding up the power of immigrant stories to speak to our shared humanity.
— Restless Books
Snails
It is 1971. Civil war has spread from the cities of East Pakistan into the countryside. Thirty miles south of the port city of Chittagong, a chill has settled over Manpur, where men and boys of different faiths gather after dusk in secret, segregated groups.
Ajoy, seventeen, sits with a Buddhist cabal in his cousin Tunu’s house. Tunu adds to the night’s rumors. The Hindus are getting it, he says. Muslims are taking furniture, radios, clothes. Suren Mitra, a Hindu businessman, has shot two looters and is trying to escape to India through the Bandarban hills.
“But listen,” another boy says. “The Muslims may not get him, but the Kukis in the Hill Tracts—”
He doesn’t finish. Everyone has heard about the naked Kukis. The talk trails off. Voices grow drowsy. In the stillness, they hear the distant boom of a Pakistani warship shelling the port of Chittagong.
At home, Ajoy’s mother kneels before a framed picture of the Buddha on the plastered mud wall of their bedroom. A candle flickers; shadows dance around the orange halo. She recites Pali sutras. Ajoy lights incense and kneels beside her.
His brother Bijan has not come home for two nights.
By VALER POPA
An excerpt from Moon Over Bucharest, a finalist for the 2026 Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing.
He was led by the apostle into a valley shut in between two hills, where everything that is lost on earth (be the fault of ours or that of time or fate) fetches up miraculously
— Ludovico Ariosto (Orlando Furioso, Canto 34)
Of course, the Favorit Cinema was closed. It had kept mute vigil behind our building for nearly thirty years—ever since some overzealous tycoon bought it shortly after the revolution, hoping to turn the place into a nightclub; ever since he went bankrupt, fired the staff, and locked the doors with a chain so massive and medieval that even now, people often wonder how such a bulky thing could still be manufactured.
By NAGHAM ASAL
At the Checkpoint, Palestine
There is a place I return to every day, though I never stay there long. It is not marked on any map, not officially named, and yet everyone knows it. It is the space between where I am allowed to be and where I need to go. A checkpoint, yes, but also something more. A waiting room without walls. A pause stretched into routine. A place where time doesn’t move forward so much as it thickens.
This is where the day often begins.
I stand in line with others; students, workers, women carrying bags heavier than they look. The line moves forward a few meters and then stops again. Cars stretch ahead of us, their engines humming in the hot air. I can smell exhaust through the open window, mixed with dust from the road and the faint smell of coffee from a driver’s paper cup. People check their phones, look toward the soldiers, then look back at the line, as if trying to measure how much longer the wait will be. The air inside the car feels warmer with every minute, and no one knows exactly when the line will move again.
By INTAN PARAMADITHA
Reviewed by LAUREN YU-TING BO
In 1797, an anonymous essay titled “Terrorist Novel Writing,” in reference to the term used to describe gothic novels at that time, appeared in the British publication The Spirit of the Public Journals. The essay concluded with a “recipe” for creating a gothic novel in the style of author Ann Radcliffe, whose writing would largely be used to define what second-wave feminist literary scholars in the 1970s would call the “female gothic.” The recipe included a list of tropes: “Take – An old castle, half of it ruinous. / A long gallery, with a great many doors, some secret ones. / Three murdered bodies, quite fresh…” And so it goes.
By JAMES K. BOYCE
With photos by TIANNE STROMBECK
Sitting on a boulder one morning on a little island in northwestern Ontario, I watched a loon fishing about fifty yards offshore. The air and water were dead calm, the lake surface mirroring the clouds above and the trees along the shoreline.
1
The hyena boys came to Bonaventure, which was serendipitous, because he was used to avoiding the world before the world spurned him. For one, his white albino skin flecked with dark spots made him a regular target of mockery. When Bonaventure was younger and his father was around and could barely afford to send him to school, his peers often taunted him to come outside in the midday heat. They dared him to come to the playground without squinting, one palm raised to block stray sunlight. They likened him to a pillar of butter melting in the sun. They asked if he was a vampire banished to the shadows.
I wouldn’t be here. Or not like this?
Grandma’s blonde ringlets had gone bald,
her teeth missing slots, her eyes—
gray-blue rime.
My Umatilla grandfather
who had one leg, lived down the road,
hobbled to her heroin loyally.
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