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Photographs from the North-West Frontier
Ed Grazda
Ed Grazda has been visiting the North-west Frontier Province since 1980, shortly after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
A Battle
Patrick Süskind
‘Early one August evening, when most people had already left the park, two men sat confronting one another across a chessboard.’
Cold Storage
Oliver Sacks
‘Uncle Toby was alive, but suspended, apparently, in some strange icy stupor.’
Paradise
Jonathan Schell
‘It is characteristic of Brodsky that he attributes the substance of his thinking to another writer's lines.’
Letters from Prison
Václav Havel & Jiří Dienstbier
‘When the governor forbade Havel to write essays, ordering him to write only about himself, he started a series on his fifteen different moods.’
Finished With Engines
Ian Jack
‘My father wrote a kind of autobiography in the years before he died.’
Weightless
Primo Levi
‘What I would like to experience most of all would be to find myself freed, even if only for a moment, from the weight of my body.’ Primo Levi on floating.
Menudo
Raymond Carver
‘Vicky says I’m crazy. She said worse things too last night. But who could blame her?’
Amazon Adventure
Redmond O’Hanlon
‘Having spent two months travelling in the primary rain forests of Borneo, I thought that a four-month journey in the country between the Orinoco River in Venezuela and the Amazon in Brazil would pose no particular problem.’
Eating the Eggs of Love
Salman Rushdie
‘Forested mesas flanked the road to Matagalpa; ahead, the multiform mountains, conical, twisted, sinuous, closed the horizon.’
A Family in Nanjing
Colin Thubron
‘The old people had prepared a banquet for me - an extravagant spread of cold meats and dumplings which we ate with the prestige television blaring, and nobody watching it.’
Under Eastern Eyes
Timothy Garton Ash
‘They sit around, feet in slippers, drinking wine and swapping jokes about Chernobyl. They have just produced the best journal of new writing in Czechoslovakia. It took about twenty minutes.’
Cuba Revisited
Martha Gellhorn
‘I drove around Havana, sightseeing, half-curious, and wholly sick of the miserable weather.’
Bradford
Hanif Kureishi
‘Bradford, I felt, was a place I had to see for myself, because it seemed that so many important issues, of race, culture, nationalism, and education, were evident in an extremely concentrated way.’
The Shaman of Chichicastenango
Norman Lewis
‘Many Guatemalans claimed to have experienced almost miraculous cures at the hands of the shamans, and the pilgrimages to Chichicastenango had begun.’
A Tour of Angola
Ryszard Kapuściński
‘You have to learn how to live with the check-points and to respect their customs, if you want to travel without hindrance and reach your destination alive.’
A Journey into Afghanistan
Peregrine Hodson
‘We had been travelling for a week, and had reached the territory of the Hesb Nasr: a rival group of mujahedin who were notorious for ambushing travellers, stealing their weapons and skinning their victims.’
The Development Game
Leonard Frank
‘We are six on the mission to the North-west Frontier: an old Japanese, a Korean, an American, a Bangladeshi, a Dutch girl, me. ... We've got four weeks to come up with a project for, say, thirty million dollars.’
China
Orville Schell
‘But if kitsch cat plates are a far cry from real art, they are also a far cry from socialist-realist propaganda.’
Empire
Richard Ford
‘Outside on the cold air, flames moved and divided and swarmed the sky. And Sims felt alone in a wide empire, removed and afloat, calmed, as if life was far away now, as if blackness was all around.’
Fast Lanes
Jayne Anne Phillips
‘I was vanished, invisible, another apartment left empty behind me, my possessions given away, thrown away, packed away in taped boxes fit into an available vehicle.’
Fishing with Wussy
Richard Russo
‘Until I was six I thought of my father the way I thought of ‘my heavenly father’, whose existence was a matter of record, but who was, practically speaking, absent and therefore irrelevant.’
Memphis
Ellen Gilchrist
‘He drove off in her car. He was wearing a white visor, a white shirt with long sleeves. I don't believe the world I lived to see.’
The Contas Girl
Robert Olmstead
‘He always felt foolish after he finished making love to the Contas girl. He felt a little piece had been given up of its own will.’
Escapes
Joy Williams
‘We went directly out of the theatre and into the streets, my mother weeping on the little usher's arm.’
Fiction by Joy Williams.
Knives
Louise Erdrich
‘It is time, now, for Karl to break down with his confession that I am a slow-burning fuse in his loins. A hair trigger. I am a name he cannot silence. A dream that never burst.’
Fiction by Louise Erdrich.
Getting The Words Out
John Updike
‘No, it is not confrontation but some wish to avoid it, some hasty wish to please, that betrays my flow of speech.’
Los Angeles Without A Map
Richard Rayner
‘I was a hysterical adolescent. But I was a hysterical adolescent with a credit card and there was a seat available.’
Slim
Adam Mars-Jones
‘My African family doesn't have the money for photographs. My African family may never even have seen a photograph.’
A True Afrikaner
Mary Benson
‘What first struck me was his courtesy: it never faltered even when some remark by the prosecutor or an action by the police angered him, hardening the expression in his blue eyes.’
Eye For An Eye: A Chronicle of Northern Ireland (Part One)
Nan Richardson & Gilles Peress
‘Belfast. There was a sound of glass breaking all over the city and a roar. Nine bomb blasts went off simultaneously in Belfast and five other cities: Newry on the border; Armargh; Londonderry; Portadown, the industrial city; and Lisburn, the Protestant northern enclave.’
