Crossbones
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Portrait of My Father
Jonathan Lethem
‘I wasn’t interested in childhood, I wanted to hang out with these guys.’
Person of the Year
Roy Robins
‘This conflation of hard-nosed realism and bright-eyed idealism has confused the aims of the award.’
Uwem Akpan | Interview
Uwem Akpan & Jeremiah Chamberlin
‘I just wanted to say something about how decent people struggle in difficult situations.’
Soumya Bhattacharya | Interview
Soumya Bhattacharya & Roy Robins
‘The emotion and the impulse of fiction is autobiographical, but the events never are.’
Mark Crick | Interview
Mark Crick
Mark Crick on the DIY tips of the world’s greatest novelists, how to inhabit another writer’s voice and why there is nothing more erotic than painting.
If I Could Tell You | New Voices
Soumya Bhattacharya
‘How will you later remember these years in Calcutta, your years of first, rapid, change in a city that had changed so much?’
How Obama Won
Ian Leslie
‘Barack Obama is himself a mixture of these things: lecture theatre and church, Harvard and Chicago’s South Side.’
Polling in New York City
Owen Sheers
‘It’s been said more than once during this US presidential campaign that the rest of the world should be allowed a vote as well.’
Saved to Drafts
ZZ Packer
‘I know you’ll make the right choice; even if you don’t, you’re still beloved family.’
Hannah Gersen | Interview
Hannah Gersen & Roy Robins
‘It’s very satisfying to write short stories because it can be a kind of game — to see how much can be revealed with just a few thousand words.’
The Rise of the British Jihad
Richard Watson
Richard Watson on Islamic fundamentalism, British security services and the future of terrorism and counter-intelligence.
Fox Deceived | New Voices
Hannah Gersen
‘Sandra was stuck at the traffic lights where route forty hit the turnpike. She was thinking about strawberries.’
Beirut | Dispatches
Lana Asfour
‘I was determined that this latest crisis wouldn’t keep me out of the country of my birth.’
Anlong Veng | Dispatches
Elena Lesley
‘There are no words to say how angry I am. I want to know why they killed their own people. I want answers.’
Can Cambodia recover from its past?
Elena Lesley
These photographs accompany Elena Lesley’s dispatch from Anlong Veng, Cambodia.
Visual Thinking:
The flawed cartographer
Catherine O’Flynn
‘Sometime after the First Gulf War, I heard on the news that sixty-three per cent of young Americans could not identify Iraq on a map of the world.’ Catherine O'Flynn in Granta 103: The Rise of the British Jihad.
In Gikuyu, for Gikuyu, of Gikuyu
Binyavanga Wainaina
‘My first name, Binyavanga, has always been a sort of barometer of public mood.’
David Heatley | Interview
David Heatley & Simon Willis
‘There’s something magical about a pictographic doodle that’s simple enough to scan and then move on.’
Crossing Cut Creek | New Voices
Erin McMillan
‘Light rose over Mama’s tanned arms, Keller’s dirty hair. The air was thick with colour and swirling dust, and we were still, suspended in it.’
Erin McMillan | Interview
Erin McMillan & Roy Robins
‘The other important component of the why of writing is that I’ve always been a bit of a liar.’
Andre Dubus III | Interview
Andre Dubus III & Catherine Tung
‘Everybody gets an imagination at birth, and I truly believe that deep down, we all have an intimate knowledge of the other.’
Dreams of Reason
Ruth Franklin
‘We know that nightmares are unreal, yet they torment us all the same.’
Zulu Romeo Foxtrot
Douglas Coupland
‘This inflexibility makes sense to a non-visual thinker, but to visual thinkers such dogma is depressing and sad, like forcing ballerinas to wear suits of armour.‘
Letter From Pondicherry, India
Akash Kapur
‘When I was growing up in Pondicherry, a former French colony on the south-east coast of India, I would go with my family each Sunday to the beach.‘
Subject+Object
You can taste the clay
Hilary Mantel
‘It is slate, heavier than it looks: dull brown in colour, a little longer and wider than the palm of my hand.‘
The Paris Intifada
Andrew Hussey
‘In the nineteenth century, Charles Baudelaire wrote of Paris being haunted by its past, by ‘ghosts in daylight.’
Blitzed Beijing
Robert Macfarlane
‘It’s at night that you really notice the dust, because artificial light suddenly makes the fines visible.’
