To See Beyond - by Anna Badkhen (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

A globe-spanning essay collection on the human condition from the author James McBride calls "one of the most creative and important nonfiction writers in our era"

Our hyper-informed digital era of climate catastrophe, historically unmatched migration, and genocide confronts us with a terrible conundrum: the pain and struggles of others are more visible than ever, yet hostility and loneliness persist. It often seems that we are on the edge of ruin, and hope, though necessary, is elusive. How can we reconcile ourselves to the world we have made?

In To See Beyond, Anna Badkhen probes the ways we ward off despair as she imagines the language we need for survival. Through engagement with contemporary literature and stories of everyday encounters with people around the world, she brings us closer to understanding how we balance delight and grief, joy and hurt, and choose to embrace life as a form of resistance.

Review Quotes

Praise for To See Beyond

Orion Magazine "Recommendations" selection
Literary Hub "New Books" & "Most Anticipated Books" selections
Foreword Reviews "Book of the Day" selection
BookBrowse "Best New Books Publishing This Month" selection

"A stunningly beautiful work of inquiry into what makes us human, what we can know about each other, and what makes life worth living in an increasingly dismal time." --Boston Globe

"A writer of conscience, with a keen observing eye and an unmatched sense of wonder and history, Badkhen is also an exquisite stylist. . . . In our time, for all time, To See Beyond is a necessary book." --World Literature Today

"Badkhen contemplates the fundamentals of the human condition [w]ith a wisdom, heart, and expansiveness reminiscent of Barry Lopez." --Orion

"Infused with hope and wonder. . . . To See Beyond rewards not only careful reading, but multiple readings." --Hippocampus Magazine

"Badkhen's prose is rich and evocative, animated by an obvious delight in the power of words to conjure faraway places and distant people, allowing us to imagine them as if we were right there with her." --On the Seawall

"Soul-stirring. . . . A quietly moving tribute to survivors of global upheaval." --Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"Elegant, erudite. . . . A fine work of journalism and belles-lettres as moral witness." --Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"Brave, probing. . . . These deep, thoughtful, multi-faceted essays address timely issues of human suffering and environmental devastation from a unique, ultimately hopeful perspective." --Foreword Reviews

"No book I have read in recent years is more relevant to our time, more insightful, more probing, more unsparing in its analysis or more generous of heart than To See Beyond. Anna Badkhen's lifetime of deep reading and dangerous living has yielded these profoundly moving essays that range from Canary Islands myth to hunger stones, from 'radical hope' and child soldiers to micro-love and prayer beads and a lifejacket graveyard on Lesvos. Through it all, she insists on asking the common questions that unite us: How to dream, how to love, how to build a better world? If you're looking for the answers, start with To See Beyond." --Ben Fountain, author of Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk and Rasputin Swims the Potomac

"In To See Beyond, Anna Badkhen wields language like a wide-eyed, percussive magician. There is little hand-holding here, thankfully. There is an exquisite exploration of where we are, how we are, who we refuse to become, and the cost of refusing to fight. The essay as a form and humans as a species need this offering." --Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy and Long Division

Select Praise for Anna Badkhen

"One of the most creative and important nonfiction writers in our era." --James McBride

"A stunning and sensitive chronicler of our collective condition." --Imani Perry

"A truly global thinker of rare and beautiful gifts." --Ilya Kaminsky

"Badkhen has an uncanny ability to address some of the most complex of modern human problems . . . and her patient consideration of what matters most in human life is unexpectedly hopeful." --Barry Lopez

"Lucid, generous, and rugged, Badkhen . . . speaks to us as a species in the early twenty-first century--where have we walked from and where are we walking." --J. M. Ledgard

"[Badkhen's] are not light-hearted essays, but ones regularly astonished by what the world holds, at once." --Eileen Myles

"Badkhen has spent her career documenting inequities around the world. . . . What grounds us in [her] daring work is Badkhen's incandescent poetics, an augury all its own." --Stephanie Elizondo Griest, New York Times Book Review

"We follow along as [Badkhen] leaves behind a trail of precise, glistening prose, and each time we arrive somewhere else we consider, once again, humanity's shifting, unstable, and essential relationship with place." --Tope Folarin, Vulture

"The roaming logic of Badkhen's essays . . . unspool themes of communion and human migration. . . . I was persistently buoyed by the tenderness [Badkhen] brings to the world and its inhabitants." --Erica Berry, The Rumpus

"Symphonic. . . . [Badkhen] is as relentless about telling a good tale as she is with revealing the scale of tragedy unfolding." --Diane Mehta, Jewish Book Council

"Brainy, poetic, global." --Melissa Febos, Bookforum

About the Author

Anna Badkhen is the author of eight books of nonfiction, including To See Beyond and Bright Unbearable Reality, longlisted for the National Book Award. Born in the Soviet Union and a former war correspondent, she is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Barry Lopez Visiting Writer in Ethics and Community Fellowship, and the Joel R. Seldin Award for Excellence in Peace and Justice Journalism, among other honors. She is an artist in residence at the University of Pennsylvania and lives in Philadelphia.