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Yellowed Pages from the Front

November 18, 2025 Fiction

Excerpted from Drownproofing and Other Stories, a finalist for the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing 2025.

Dr. Rafael Améndarez
San Francisco, California, United States of America

July 14, 1968

Srita. Liliam Améndarez
San Salvador, El Salvador, Central America

Greetings my always dear cousin, Lili!

Last week I was discharged from the hospital, and considering my life’s current hustle and bustle, just in case, I’ve decided to congratulate you in advance for your birthday. Congratulations a thousand times on that auspicious August 9.
A few days ago, by accident, I came across a letter among old and musty papers. One of those things one keeps without knowing why. Things that are stored away after reading them and are not read again until that day when unexpectedly, by chance, they appear in our hands. Imagine a letter written a whopping two decades ago! Yellowed by the years. A letter from a friend. This one dates back to World War II.

At that time, I was in France with the American army. I remember it was a freezing day, bitterly cold, in January 1944. There in the French Vosges, between Colmar and Strasbourg. That winter I remember vividly because it was extremely harsh. A man could be wounded and freeze within minutes. Climbing a mountain loaded with winter clothing, weapons, and ammunition, one would sweat, and that sweat running down the face, sliding, in a moment when one stopped to catch their breath, froze into ice splinters, which could be peeled off.

Sandwich

November 18, 2025 Fiction

By BETO CARADEPIEDRA

Excerpted from Jaguar, a finalist for the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing 2025.

It was hard to stand out in the family alone. Benito’s parents, tías and tíos, valued children more than they valued money. They valued mothers more than they did models. When a man in the family became a father, he might as well have become a judge, or a reverend. You could be an arsonist, a seasoned gangster. You could even have slept with the priest. But if you became a parent, you would be alright in their eyes.

Tío Esteban was forty-one when he went to prison again. And Tía was older: forty-five. It didn’t seem likely that they would become parents, so all faith in them was lost.

Read Excerpts by Finalists for the Restless Books Kellman Prize for Immigrant Literature 2025

November 18, 2025 News and Events

This year, 2025, marks the tenth anniversary of the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing, which supports immigrant writers whose work examines how immigration shapes our lives, our communities, and our world. In honor of the anniversary, Restless Books’ unstintingly generous board member, Steven G. Kellman—whose grandparents were immigrants to the United States—has endowed the prize so that it may continue in perpetuity. As ICE and federal agents invade our cities, we hope the newly named Kellman Prize for Immigrant Literature can serve as a reminder that immigrants’ voices deserve to be heard. Anyone familiar with history knows that immigrants have always been the gravitational center of the extraordinary American experiment.

Of course, freedom is not only under siege in America, but all across the globe. As autocrats deny the rights of people in Palestine, in Sudan, in Ukraine to remain on their own land, forced displacement is happening everywhere.

The 2025 Kellman Prize for Immigrant Literature was judged by Dinaw Mengestu, Rajiv Mohabir, and Ilan Stavans; the winner will be announced by LitHub on December 2. Please join us in celebrating the work of the following four finalists, and in holding up the power of immigrant stories to remind us of our common humanity. No one is free until all of us are free.

— Restless Books

Translating Toward Possibility: Sarah Faux Interviews Mariam Rahmani

November 10, 2025 Interviews

Headshots of Sarah Faux and Mariam Rahmani

Sarah Faux (left) and Mariam Rahmani (right)

Friends for over a decade, MARIAM RAHMANI and SARAH FAUX have been connecting for years about their respective artistic practices. They recently spoke over Zoom for The Common: Sarah from her painting studio, and Mariam from her office in Vermont. In the following conversation, they discuss Mariam’s novel, Liquid, published earlier this year, which centers a queer Muslim woman who navigates 100 dates in one summer. They speak on how translating others’ work has served Mariam’s own voice in writing, and how messiness and uncertainty are at the heart of good literature.

Islands

October 27, 2025 Fiction, Issue 30, Issue 30 Fiction

By CASEY WALKER

Twelve years ago, in waters off the Azores, my father was thrown overboard on a whale-watching skiff and my mother thought she could save him. The trip had been my mother’s dream. She hadn’t seen the islands since she was a child, visiting her grandparents. My father’s overconfidence about boating in bad weather, an unanticipated storm surge, a possibly intoxicated boat pilot—that was the tragedy of my mother’s ancestral homecoming. No bodies were ever recovered. In lieu of caskets, the funeral director set up an oversized portrait taken on my parents’ wedding day. That young couple, with expressions formally posed, was all but unrecognizable to me.

Ellen

October 27, 2025 Fiction, Issue 30, Issue 30 Fiction

By ELSA LYONS

Giving birth hurt much less than I had expected. There was a feeling like someone’s hands were tying my organs into intricate knots and then loosening them. Finally, a great loosening, and a wail, a tiny squirming marvel lowered into my arms. During pregnancy, I had been afraid of the pain. It seemed wrong to be afraid, so I didn’t discuss it, not even with Andrew. I had never experienced overwhelming physical pain; nothing more than a fractured ankle in ninth grade, a couple of bad toothaches. I knew this would be worse—I just wished there was a way to know precisely how much worse.

Smith

October 27, 2025 Fiction, Issue 30, Issue 30 Fiction

By CORY BEIZER

Before my mother can return to her life and stop watching me eat, she says she must give me a dog. She swears a companion is the only way she’ll feel safe leaving me alone. It makes no sense. How can I take care of a dog if I am failing to take care of myself? She says that’s the point, to learn how to care, and if the dog dies, well, then she’ll know when to come back. I tell her no. My beloved cow figurine is companion enough. Its thick apotropaic horns will fend off the evil that is sure to return.

Mermaid of Longnook

October 27, 2025 Fiction, Issue 30, Issue 30 Fiction

By LAURA GERINGER BASS

Carla wore a mask while trudging down the precipitous dune that shadowed Longnook Beach, her heaven on earth. She had brought from her city stash a colorful assortment of boldly patterned Mexican face coverings to make the necessity of protecting herself from airborne viral droplets less depressing. But bright flowers and butterflies, stout yellow ears of corn, and iconic unibrow Frida Kahlo faces made it no easier to breathe on the descent.

Most days, Carla used the shaft of her sheathed sun umbrella to steady herself while maneuvering over uneven ground. Today, Tom wasn’t there to help her carry her beach chair, so she had left the heavy umbrella at home. She wasn’t one of those old ladies who needed a cane, was she? A grinding creak from her arthritic left knee followed by an aching twinge and throb of pain from her right hip warned her that the uphill return would be a challenge.

The Sixteenth Brother

October 27, 2025 Fiction, Issue 30, Issue 30 Fiction

By A. J. BERMUDEZ

The way Khalida tells the story is this: for two hundred years, Riad Jennaa has belonged to the descendants of Abdellah Bensaïd. But, she is swift to point out, not all his descendants. In Morocco, since time immemorial and perhaps even before then, women have received half the inheritance of their male counterparts. She tells this part with a shrug. It’s not fair, but it’s the Quran.

Faction of None

October 27, 2025 Fiction, Issue 30, Issue 30 Fiction

By TAMAS DOBOZY

The videos of Christmas dinner were for Mom, or so Pete said. His gift, honoring the hours she’d spent preparing the meals. But he couldn’t fool me—or her. He filmed the dinners because it got him out of eating what she cooked: the tofurkey he hated, the beet salad that made him gag, the quinoa that sparkled like a plateful of sand. Pete would rather have starved than eaten food he didn’t like, which was most food, staying skinny as a nail with the hunger he preferred, as if craving was better than sustenance, desire superior to satisfaction, and want itself his personal god.

All posts tagged: Fiction

Yellowed Pages from the Front

Sandwich

Read Excerpts by Finalists for the Restless Books Kellman Prize for Immigrant Literature 2025

Translating Toward Possibility: Sarah Faux Interviews Mariam Rahmani

Islands

Ellen

Smith

Mermaid of Longnook

The Sixteenth Brother

Faction of None

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