In Everything I See Your Hand

In these ten stories, we see the brilliance of Naira Kuzmich spinning variations of immigrant life in the Little Armenia neighborhood of Los Angeles, where the realities of exile exist alongside the realities of diasporic and intergenerational entanglement. What's the difference between leaving the motherland in order to pursue grander desires—a promised better life in the U.S.—and leaving the literal mother or family line? When does the journey toward self-possession become something closer to self-exile? Living daily in the tension between assimilation and disillusionment, the Armenian-American protagonists of In Everything I See Your Hand struggle with the belief that their futures are already decided, futures that they can only escape through death or departure—if they can escape them at all. Before her death at age 29, Naira Kuzmich finished this collection. In their empathy, savvy, and ardently wrought language, these stories are gifts that seduce, devastate, and shine.