When we moved to America thirty-five years ago, many things took me by surprise, like gun shops next to barbershops, freeways that tangled like yarn, people who knocked on your door to talk about Jesus, twenty different kinds of milk at the grocery store, signs that said don’t even think about parking here. “Listen,” Claudia told her sharply, the way she does sometimes, when callers start to ramble and refuse to face the obvious, “nobody said that marriage was easy. That night, a young woman was calling in to say she had gotten married just six months ago, but she and her husband were already fighting because he wanted to move to Portland to be a nature photographer, and she wanted to stay at her job with an insurance company in Salt Lake City, and neither one of them would change their minds. Usually, she’s on at lunchtime, and I listen to her while I’m peeling potatoes or chopping parsley, but the show is so popular that they rebroadcast it again at ten p.m. I was trying to stay awake, so I switched on the radio and looked for Claudia Corbett’s show on KDGL. A professor of creative writing at UC Riverside, she lives in Los Angeles. Laila Lalami has won the American Book Award, the Arab American Book Award, and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. The hit-and-run death of a Moroccan-American immigrant brings together a diverse cast of characters, the town faces its hypocrisies, and love is born. The following is from Laila Lalami's novel The Other Americans.
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