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    Leah Griesmann

    Leah Griesmann has received a Swatch Art Peace Hotel Writing Residency in Shanghai, an Elizabeth George Foundation Grant in Fiction, a MacDowell Colony Fellowship in Fiction, a DAAD Grant in Fiction (Berlin), and a Steinbeck Fellowship in Fiction. Her stories have appeared in The Weekly Rumpus, Union Station, The Cortland Review, J Journal: New Writing on Justice, and PEN Center USA’s The Rattling Wall. Her nonfiction pieces have appeared in Poets & Writers, The Review Review, United Press International, The Virginia Quarterly Review Online, The Transnational, and the Huffington Post, among other publications. She is currently at work on a novel and a collection of stories.

    Leah Griesmann

    Nonfiction

    Beirut, Beirut

    Leah Griesmann·
    If New York is the city that never sleeps, Beirut is the city that never stops smoking. The scent is everywhere—fragrant, like the flavored argileh emitted from the hookahs in cafes and bars, or ashy, like the Winstons, Marlboros, and Cedars that droop from the mouths of shopkeepers and cabbies and are waved like sabers when conversations get hot...