The Moon and the Batteries
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Rewriting the Rules of the Game
Ian Leslie
Ian Leslie on Barack Obama's election in 2008 and forthcoming administration.
Lost in Translation
Daniel Alarcón
‘It’s about the music of it. “It’s Hollywood,” Mario said, and assured me the same is true of political speech-making.’
A Literature for Politics: Introduction
Bill Buford
‘‘A Literature for Politics' is dedicated to a different set of possibilities - the possibilities of political engagement.’
Coda
Simon Gray
Pleasantries and Other Pleasures It’s a heavenly day. Warm, with the mildest of breezes, the...
The Destiny of Nathalie X
William Boyd
’I once heard a theory about this town, this place where we work and wrangle, where we swindle and swive‘.
Brief Encounters
Richard Murphy
‘The year was 1944. The Germans had started to rain their first flying bombs on England’.
Call If You Need Me
Raymond Carver
‘She watched me as I wrote out a cheque for the three months’ rent. Later, back at the motel, in bed, she lay with her hand on her forehead and said, “I envy your wife.”’
Fiction by Raymond Carver.
The Final Days of Dr Doe
Lynda Schuster
‘In the summer of 1990, tens of thousands of Liberians died in a civil war of remarkable brutality. Many more starved to death'.
Do I Owe You Something?
Michael Mewshaw
‘In the fall of 1971, Rome enjoyed an unbroken skein of bright crisp mornings and balmy afternoons that stretched on into November’.
The Separated
Tim Lott
‘It is a short January day, unseasonably warm. The afternoon is getting dark and it isn't yet four o'clock’.
This is Centerville
James Buchan
‘In the imagination of strangers there is a small town in America which represents not just itself but the whole country‘.
September, 1973
Ariel Dorfman
‘It's that simple: there is a day in my past, a day many years ago in Santiago de Chile, when I should have died and did not.’
Captain Mbaye Diagne
Mark Doyle
‘The Rwandan town of Nyamata is thirty kilometres south of Kigali, the capital'.
Man Walks Into A Bar
James Kelman
‘I had been living abroad for twelve years and I was gaun hame, maybe forever, maybe a month.‘
Emma
Deborah Scroggins
‘When I think of Nasir, I remember the sun. Nothing in that place escaped it.’
The War of The Words
Alexander Stille
‘The world in which he grew up, a pastoral nomadic life that developed over centuries in isolation, is disappearing’.
The Nuba
Jack Picone & John Ryle
‘They show people denied access to markets that they enjoyed before the war, people impoverished by the fight to preserve their culture and to assert control of their territory.’
The Lepers of Moyo
Paul Theroux
‘Boarding the train in the African darkness just before dawn was like climbing into the body of a huge, dusty monster'.
An Amateur Spy In Arabia
Norman Lewis
‘In the 1930s I wanted to travel and I wanted to write. In 1935, I published my first book—about a journey to Spain’.
The Separate World of Seaports
James Hamilton-Paterson & Alex Majoli
‘I am aged eight or nine, on a family outing by Thames water bus in London’.
Nothing But Ghosts
Judith Hermann
‘Afterwards Ellen liked to say she had once been to America but couldn't remember it very well.‘
Arguing With The Dead
Dan Jacobson
‘My childhood was spent in Kimberley, the diamond-mining town in South Africa.In those years most of the mines were no longer being worked’.
