Phantom Pain
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Night in the Afternoon
Caroline Lamarche
‘A little entrance hall. A staircase. To the left of the staircase, a door with a window leading into the concierge's room.’
Lingua Franca
Luc Sante
‘In order to write of my childhood I have to translate. It is as if I were writing about someone else. As a boy, I lived in French; now, I live in English.’
Whooah . . . Pizza!
Pierre Merle
The following examples of contemporary French slang come from Le Dico de l'Argot fin-de-siècle compiled by a Parisian journalist, Pierre Merle.
Agnès
René Belletto
‘Having told his story, the thief had said goodbye to Agnès, regretfully, she thought’.
The Farm at Le Garet
Raymond Depardon
‘On days when the light is beautiful, when the sun is red above the Saône, I find myself regretting not having come more often when my parents were working the farm.’
The Case of Stephen Lawrence
Brian Cathcart
‘Stephen Lawrence was murdered on the night of 22 April 1993, in Eltham, a south-eastern suburb of London.‘
Don’t Forsake Me
Ivan Klíma
'Bára went to the church on the advice of her friend Ivana. She had been suffering from occasional bouts of depression', Ivan Klíma in 'Don't Forsake Me' in Granta 59: France: The Outsider.
A Note on Shakespeare
Harold Pinter
‘Shakespeare writes of the open wound and, through him, we know it open and know it closed. We tell when it ceases to beat and tell it at its highest peak of fever‘, Harold Pinter in 'A Note on Shakespeare' in Granta 59: France: The Outsider.
The Money Chronicles
Paul Auster
‘I went through a period of several years when everything I touched turned to failure.’
The Roads of London
Doris Lessing
‘You could not get a decent cup of coffee anywhere in the British Isles.’
Heraldry
George Steiner
‘Papa embodied, as did every corner of our Paris home, the tenor, the prodigality and glow of Jewish-European and Central-European emancipation.’
Lover
Joyce Carol Oates
‘You won't know me, won't see my face. Unless you see my face. And then it will be too late.’
Maori War
Peter Walker
‘It would be hard to overstate the importance of genealogy in Maori society.’
The Vulgar Soul
John Biguenet
‘She got skinny and became a clairvoyant. And she wasn't even a stigmatic.’
India! The Golden Jubilee: Introduction
Ian Jack
‘I first went to India twenty years ago as a reporter.’
Blood
Urvashi Butalia
‘Stories are all that people have, stories that rarely breach the frontiers of family and religious community’
Kashmir
James Buchan
‘I see in an instant what has brought people to the valley for four centuries.’
Five Hours to Simla
Anita Desai
‘He had his hands deep in his pockets, and his face was lined with a frown deeply embedded with dust.’
Kabir Street
R. K. Narayan
‘Nagaraj had begun to have doubts about his standing in his ancestral home’
After Gandhi
Trevor Fishlock
‘His room is as he left it, furnished with a carpet, a spinning wheel, a low white table, a mattress and cushion.’
An Accidental Spy
Phillip Knightley
‘The CIA had become concerned about Soviet influence in India in the early 1960s.’
Sampati
Vikram Seth
‘Why do you cry?’
Vikram Seth’s Petrarchan sonnet based on a character in the Ramayana.
Bombay Notebooks
V.S. Naipaul
August 20 The monsoon rain was blown on the concrete by the aeroplane as it...
