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Posts by: Beverly Parayno

Yiyun Li’s “A Soldier Home”

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Late last night I sat in the Labor & Delivery waiting room in the hospital where my brother and sister-in-law were preparing for the birth of their first child.  They had checked in early that morning, but the baby still hadn’t arrived.  I was the only family member who could make it to the hospital, so I waited alone, except for the anxious grandmother across from me who had been waiting all day for her first grandchild to be delivered.  I thought about Raymond Carver’s story “A Small, Good Thing,” and wondered if I should reach out to this woman in the same way Ann Weiss does with the family whose son is undergoing surgery.

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