‘Damn, brother. You saw what they did to my face? / Poked out my eyes. Knocked teeth out of place’.
Boy, yaar, they sure called me some good names of late:
e.g. opportunist (dangerous). E.g. full-of-hate,
self-aggrandizing, Satan, self-loathing and shrill,
the type it would clean up the planet to kill.
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Doctors, solitude and the stones within us – for fiction about isolation, it has to be Haruki Murakami. Translated from the Japanese by Jay Rubin.
‘Things have changed without seeking permission.’ A plague diary of this March, by Gonçalo M. Tavares, translated from the Portuguese by Daniel Hahn.
‘Our view of the morning’s entertainment was restricted by the width of the door frame.’ Bruce Chatwin writes about his imprisonment during a coup in Benin.
‘A leech bodes this: you will, sooner or later, overflow yourself. ’ Rebecca Giggs on leeches and the borders of the human body.
‘Her eyes fluttered open and I felt like I was at the edge of the mouth of a cave, with every intention of jumping in.’ For pure escapism, lose yourself in the nineteenth-century Paris of Carmen Maria Machado.
‘It’s often said that writers should never explain their work, but perhaps we could agree that these are exceptional circumstances.’
‘Let me tell you, boyo, bach: I love this place, where green hills shelter me from fear.’
‘You open a book by a writer you’ve never heard of and a new voice leaps off the page and makes you listen.’
‘I'm not quite the same person as the ‘me’ about whom the book is written.’
‘How did it feel to have a Jewish grandfather who owed his life to the friendship, or gratitude, or mercy, of Adolf Hitler?’
