Published in 2020
252 pages
Nicole Chung has written for The New York Times, the Times Magazine, GQ, Longreads, The Cut, Vulture, Slate, and Hazlitt, among others. She is the editor in chief of Catapult magazine and the former managing editor of The Toast. Her first book, a memoir, All You Can Ever Know was a national bestseller. Published in 2019, it was long-listed for PEN Open Book Award, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography and named a Best Book of the Year by The Washington Post, NPR, Time, The Boston Globe, Real Simple, Buzzfeed, Jezebel, Bustle, Library Journal, Chicago Public Library, and more.
Mensah Demary is a founding editor of Catapult magazine and editor at large of Catapult books.
What is this book about?
From rediscovering an ancestral village in China to experiencing the realities of American life as a Nigerian, the search for belonging crosses borders and generations. Selected from the archives of Catapult magazine, the essays in A Map Is Only One Story highlight the human side of immigration policies and polarized rhetoric, as twenty writers share provocative personal stories of existing between languages and cultures.
Victoria Blanco relates how those with family in both El Paso and Ciudad Juárez experience life on the border. Nina Li Coomes recalls the heroines of Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki and what they taught her about her bicultural identity. Nur Nasreen Ibrahim details her grandfather’s crossing of the India-Pakistan border sixty years after Partition. Krystal A. Sital writes of how undocumented status in the United States can impact love and relationships. Porochista Khakpour describes the challenges in writing (and rewriting) Iranian America. Through the power of personal narratives, as told by both emerging and established writers, A Map Is Only One Story offers a new definition of home in the twenty-first century.
