On the Extremest Verge
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A Memory Palace for Brothers Who Flew Just Close Enough to the Sun & Created the Storm
Ellah Wakatama Allfrey
Ellah Wakatama Allfrey remembers Binyavanga Wainaina.
Screaming
Harley Hern
Harley Hern’s ‘Screaming’ is the Pacific regional winner of the 2019 Commonwealth Short Story Prize.
Mother and Son:
Life and Fate
Robert Chandler
‘Nothing made her happier than to sacrifice herself for her son’s happiness.’
A Season on Earth
Gerald Murnane
‘He had forgotten in the seminary how many distractions there were in the world.’
Distributed Denial of Service
Merritt Tierce
‘Once you learn to seal the shell, to make it watertight, you can let anything roil around in there.’
The Sole Purveyor of Madame Bovary in Beijing circa 1989
Amanda Lee Koe
‘In the day, his bevy of besotted rustics were coached in maxims of libertarian socialism. By night: rice wine orgies and folk punk sing-alongs.’
The Ungrateful Refugee
Dina Nayeri
‘I was born in 1979, a year of revolution, and grew up in wartime.’ Dina Nayeri on growing up in the Islamic Republic of Iran.
How I Write My Books
Anne Serre
Anne Serre on how she writes. Translated from the French by Mark Hutchinson.
Four Poems
Mark Waldron
‘Just look at those nasty trees flaunt / their leaves, each one a tra-la-la.’
Zanele Muholi: Somnyama Ngonyama, Hail the Dark Lioness
Zanele Muholi & Anne McNeill
‘Zanele Muholi is a photographer, often described as one of the most powerful visual activists of our time, and a long-time advocate for their black LGBTQ+ community.’
Loudermilk
Lucy Ives
‘The bro has a pair of plump dogs over which he deploys nauseating quantities of ketchup.’
In Conversation
Lucy Ives & Niina Pollari
‘For me, narratives are always tied to and emerging from other narratives; there is no single beginning, no origin.’
To Zinder
Sven Lindqvist
Obsessed with a single line from Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness – Kurtz’s injunction to ‘Exterminate All the Brutes’ – Sven Lindqvist set out across Central Africa, and wrote a book that revealed precisely what Europe’s imperial powers had exacted on Africa’s people over the course of the preceding two centuries.
Rules for Visiting
Jessica Francis Kane
‘It wasn’t until the end of dinner, when my aunt started clearing and my grandmother demanded another bottle of wine, that I began to understand.’
American Girl and Boy from Shobrakheit
Noor Naga
‘Question: is romance just a father who never carried you to bed carrying you, at last, to bed?’
In Conversation
Liz Berry & Mona Arshi
‘I longed for poems to meet me in my sorrow and help me know how to live in that new world, how to survive it.’
Pajtim Statovci | Notes on Craft
Pajtim Statovci
‘My childhood was pierced not only by the violence in Kosovo but also by the violence my immigrant family was confronted with in Finland.’
The Summer After the War
Kazuo Ishiguro
‘As it was, my grandfather began helping me to paint without my having to ask him.’
The Fall of Saigon
James Fenton
‘I wanted to see a communist victory, which I presumed to be inevitable. I wanted to see the fall of a city.’
Tadpoles
Primo Levi
‘It was a harsh and brutal puberty: the tiny creatures began to fret, as if an inner sense had forewarned them of the torment in store’
The Imam and the Indian
Amitav Ghosh
‘We were both travelling, he and I: we were travelling in the West. The only difference was that I had actually been there, in person.’
His Roth
Philip Roth
‘I naively believed as a child that I would always have a father present, and the truth seems to be that I always will.’
Glitches
John Gregory Dunne
‘I prefer not to speculate about what might have happened if I had not taken the ECG.’
The Snow in Ghana
Ryszard Kapuściński
‘We always carry it to foreign countries, all over the world, our pride and our powerlessness.’ Translated from the Polish by William Brand.
The Little Winter
Joy Williams
‘She remembered being happy off and on that day, and then looking at things and finding it all unkind.’
At Yankee Stadium
Don DeLillo
‘From a series of linked couples they become one continuous wave, larger all the time.’
The Zoo in Basel
John Berger
‘To create is to let take over something which did not exist before and is therefore new.’
Dreams for Hire
Gabriel García Márquez
‘The wave had erupted with such force that it obliterated the glass lobby.‘
A short story by Gabriel García Márquez, translated by Nick Caistor.
Editorial
Bill Buford
Bill Buford on his decision to resign as editor of this magazine, which he relaunched in its present form in 1979.
