‘What happened in 1979 has happened many times before and many times since, in places where people have set themselves free and believed with all their hearts that the freedom they had fought for was real and lasting, only to be recaptured.’
In the land of Ferdowsi, of Rumi and Omar Khayyam, Hafez and Scheherazade, in October of the year 1977, fifty-nine poets and writers assembled to read and recite for ten continuous nights. Ten thousand people gathered in the gardens and halls of the Goethe Institute in Tehran. The stories and poems …
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‘The anglophone world, we have to infer, has run out of words for its own feelings.’
Daisy Hildyard on the wisdom of scarecrows.
‘What is the read receipt for?’
Lillian Fishman on texting, power and the ethics of leaving a friend on read.
‘Like pretty much everyone who uses the internet, I have seen many terrible things that I did not search for and that I cannot unsee.’
Rosanna McLaughlin on what the internet thinks she wants.
‘I have a pathological addiction to the internet, which I indulge with the excuse of making art. It rarely translates to anything good and mostly leaves me overstimulated and afraid.’
Paul Dalla Rosa on excess and the internet.
‘rumors of bees on speedwell, / no oxidative stress just / effortless pollination’
Two poems by Sylvia Legris.
‘Jalloh likes to keep accurate records of such things. After all, nobody else does.’
‘The Eilat–Ashkelon pipeline went into operation in 1969, on the eve of the nationalisation of oil.’
Laleh Khalili on energy politics and the ‘secret’ pipeline transporting crude oil across southern Israel.
‘I hope to hear the spirit of my mother’s native pessimism faintly pass through a line of translated poetry’
Poetry from Eve Esfandiari-Denney.
‘How little one knows, really, about one’s parents.’
Memoir by Didier Eribon translated by Michael Lucey.
‘He takes the knife, cuts the barb from the body, sends it back to the depths of the river.’
An extract from Not a River by Selva Almada, translated by Annie McDermott.
‘What if our art had not been stolen, our people not enslaved? What if we imagined a good story, a righteous and just story, and then we worked to make it true?’
