Total war has a thousand fronts; during such a war, everyone is at the front, even if they never lie in a trench or fire a single shot.
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‘All through the war I dream of shoes.’
Total war has a thousand fronts; during such a war, everyone is at the front, even if they never lie in a trench or fire a single shot.
Sign in to Granta.com.
‘We meet at various points in the great swathes of the past that neither of us were alive to witness.’
Allen Bratton on a daytrip to a castle with his older boyfriend.
‘Listening to three white poets, whom I suspect are academics, talk about the state of poetry.’
Oluwaseun Olayiwola eavesdrops on an older generation.
‘I’d been dubious about his company at first.’
Sarah Moss on watching Shakespeare with her twelve-year-old son.
‘She didn’t trust us because, to her, tenants were like children.’
Kate Zambreno on negotiating with her older landlady.
‘A moment now swallowed in embarrassment, I asked a question only a young person might ask an older one.’
Lynne Tillman on trying to understand what makes a generation.
Ryszard Kapuscinski was born in 1932 in Pinsk in eastern Poland and educated in Warsaw. His first book, The Polish Bush, which reported from the Polish 'frontier', appeared in 1962 and was an immediate best-seller. He travelled widely throughout the Third World as a foreign correspondent, storing up, as he once said in an interview, the experiences for the books that would come later. The first of these books, published in 1968, was based on a journey through Islamic Russia. This was followed by books on Africa, Latin America and South Africa. His first book to be translated into English was The Emperor, based on the last days of Haile Selassie. His other books in English include Another Day of Life, about the war in Angola, and Shah of Shahs, about the revolution in Iran. He is also the author of the highly acclaimed Imperium, the story of his travels across the dying empire of the Soviet Union in 1989, which is also published by Granta Books. Ryszard Kapuscinski died in Warsaw in January 2007 at the age of seventy-four.
More about the author →Klara Glowczewska was born in Warsaw, Poland, and raised in Raleigh, North Carolina, Cairo, Egypt, and New Canaan, Connecticut. She has translated, from the Polish to English, two books by the internationally acclaimed writer Ryszard Kapuściński, about the former Soviet Union (Imperium) and Africa (The Shadow of the Sun). Klara Glowczewska was appointed Editor in Chief of Condé Nast Traveler in January 2005, having served as the magazine’s Executive Editor since December 1992.
More about the translator →‘We always carry it to foreign countries, all over the world, our pride and our powerlessness.’ Translated from the Polish by William Brand.
Ryszard Kapuściński, once the only foreign correspondent for the Polish Press Agency, on the concept of borders.
‘Mine is not a vocation, it's a mission.’
‘On the flatbed lies a coffin. Atop the black box is a garland of haggard angels.’
‘In Poland we read every text as allusive; every situation described - even the most remote in time and space - is immediately applied to Poland.’
‘We all knew that about the gods – that they were total sex.’
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