Early in Samuel Shimon’s first-person autobiographical novel An Iraqi in Paris ( ‘Irāqī fī Bāris), the young author-narrator has left his hometown of Habbaniya, Iraq on the eve of Saddam Hussein’s military takeover of the country. A child pushcart vendor now in his early twenties, Shmuel harbors a rags-to-riches dream of traveling to the US and making it big as a Hollywood director. While he hails from a poor Assyrian Christian family, he is detained and tortured in Damascus, due in part to his...

Sometime last year, I came across an article in which the director Lee Isaac Chung described the formative influence of Willa Cather’s My Ántonia on his 2020 film Minari. I knew then that I needed to find the right person—or people—to explore these narratives of immigrant families in the harsh and beautiful environs of the rural United States, which form a tether from the modernist moment to the present. The result is this moving and insightful epistolary conversation between Rachel Warner, a...