Articles by Chris Bohjalian

About Chris Bohjalian (9 Articles)

Chris Bohjalian is the author of 19 books, including the New York Times bestsellers The Sandcastle Girls, The Night Strangers, Skeletons at the Feast, and The Double Bind. His novel Midwives was a number one New York Times bestseller and a selection of Oprah’s Book Club. His work has been translated into more than 25 languages, and three of his novels have become movies. Bohjalian’s most recent novel, The Sleepwalker, was published in Jan. 2017. Bohjalian’s awards include the ANCA Freedom Award for his work educating Americans about the Armenian Genocide; the ANCA Arts and Letters Award for The Sandcastle Girls; the Saint Mesrob Mashdots Medal; and the Anahid Literary Award.

Bohjalian: Putting a Face on the Refugee Crisis

BURLINGTON, Vt. (Burlington Free Press)—For most of America, the heartbreaking faces of Syrian refugees this year have belonged to children. We have seen them drowned and we have seen them stunned into silence by warfare and covered in blood. (We’ve also seen them likened to Skittles, but that [more...]

October 16, 2016 // 3 Comments

Bohjalian: Murder Cannot Be Hid Long. The Truth Will Out.

The Armenian Weekly Magazine April 2015: A Century of Resistance In March I spent three days at “Responsibility 2015,” the conference on the Armenian Genocide sponsored by the Armenian Revolutionary Federation held in Manhattan. At the end of the final day, I was at once invigorated and [more...]

June 4, 2015 // 15 Comments

Bohjalian: A Little Hope amidst the Monastery Debris

The other day I watched an eight-year-old boy named Ulash (pronounced Oo-lush) spontaneously take a white plastic grocery bag and fill it with potato chip wrappers, cigarette butts, and crushed plastic water bottles. Ulash (Photo by Victoria Blewer) This was newsworthy not simply because small boys [more...]

August 29, 2014 // 8 Comments

Bohjalian: The boulder’s big, but our children can move it

A child brings two heavy buckets of water into the home of a strange old woman and discovers there a wall of cages with dogs trapped inside–and a small carpet on the floor that has been woven from dog fur. A nine-year-old girl refuses to go to bed, reducing her parents to tears of happiness. . [more...]

August 31, 2013 // 0 Comments

Bohjalian: Shining a Light on the Shadow of Denial

The Armenian Weekly April 2013 Magazine One night in November 2009, I heard Gerda Weissmann Klein speak in Austin, Texas, at the Hillel chapter at the University of Texas. Gerda is not only one of the most charismatic women I’ve ever met, she is also an immensely gifted writer and speaker. She is [more...]

May 13, 2013 // 2 Comments

Bohjalian: Forrest Gump Goes to Beirut

We all have a little Forrest Gump in us. A bit of Leonard Zelig. We’ve all had those moments when, suddenly, we are not merely witnesses to an instant fraught with meaning, but we are participants in the scene. We see ourselves both in the minute and with a cinematic distance: Camera pulls back [more...]

December 17, 2012 // 3 Comments

500 Years: A Celebration of Ink and Paper and Glue

Special Issue: Celebrating 500 Years of Armenian Printing The Armenian Weekly, Sept. 1, 2012 (Download article in PDF) No one is ever going to confuse the Madenataran with the local neighborhood bookstore. It sits on a hill in downtown Yerevan, a massive, 122-thousand-square-foot block of marble [more...]

September 6, 2012 // 1 Comment

The Kernel that Led to ‘The Sandcastle Girls’

The Armenian Weekly Magazine April 2012 Sometimes my novels have positively elephantine gestation periods—and even that, in some cases, is an underestimate. A mother elephant carries her young for not quite two years; I have spent, in some cases, not quite two decades contemplating the tiniest [more...]

May 2, 2012 // 6 Comments

Bohjalian: The Exotic Boy who Became a Mad Man

Among my favorite photographs of my father is an old black and white image that was taken when he was five years old. It’s a formal portrait from 1933: He is standing between his mother and father, and the three of them are impeccably coiffed. My grandfather is dressed the way I would remember [more...]

September 1, 2011 // 5 Comments