In Everything I See Your Hand by Naira Kuzmich

What’s the difference between leaving the motherland and leaving the literal mother? When does the journey toward self-possession become something closer to self-exile? Living daily in the tension between assimilation, disillusionment, and desire, the Armenian-American protagonists of In Everything I See Your Hand struggle with the belief that their futures are already decided, futures that can only be escaped through death or departure—if they can be escaped at all.

In these ten brilliant stories, Naira Kuzmich spins variations of immigrant life in the Little Armenia neighborhood of Los Angeles. Kuzmich finished this collection before her death at age twenty-nine. Melding empathy, savvy, and candor through ardently wrought language, these stories are gifts that seduce, devastate, and shine.

“Her writing was rich with Armenian culture, with old blood and the glittering black eyes of strong and deeply feminine women. . . . Since her passing in the fall of 2017, Naira’s talent has inspired me to tell her story to others. She’s caught the fears of many a stalled writer. ‘Here’s the issue,’ she wrote to me. ‘My window is closing.’ In every writer I’ve encouraged to finish their novel, their memoir, their history, I see her hand.” — Roz Foster, Naira’s former literary agent

Naira Kuzmich was born in Armenia and raised in the Los Angeles en- clave of Little Armenia. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in West Branch, Blackbird, Ecotone, The O. Henry Prize Stories 2015, The Threepenny Review, The Massachusetts Review, The Cincinnati Review, and elsewhere. She passed away in 2017 from lung cancer.

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