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Vinod Kumar Shukla: Two Poems
Vinod Kumar Shukla
‘The truth is, though no one says it, / They’re all worried about their children.’
Sticky Fingers
Arun Kolatkar
‘Selecting the right kind of a tomato was crucial for the scam to work.’
The Afterlife of Trees and Their Lovers
Sumana Roy
‘It is difficult to imagine a history of trees / without man in it. Man as tree, Tree as tale.’
Rain at Three
Tishani Doshi
‘Rain at three splits the bed in half, / cracks at windows like horsemen blistering / through a century of hibernation.’
The Wrong Square
Neel Mukherjee
‘Something as fundamental to intelligence as counting was eluding him.’
Ghachar Ghochar
Vivek Shanbhag
‘That single moment’s intensity hasn’t been matched in my life before or since. A woman who I didn’t know has chosen to accept me, in body and mind.’
Anjan Sundaram and Lindsey Hilsum In Conversation
Lindsey Hilsum & Anjan Sundaram
‘Sometimes we don’t quite know what we’re seeing.’
Anjali Joseph | First Sentence
Anjali Joseph
‘I kept returning to the Beckett stories, a favourite since I came upon them in my late teens.’
The Fixer
Snigdha Poonam
‘In Indian media and advertising, young people are mainly being projected as vessels of breathless aspiration.’
Three Prose Poems
Sharmistha Mohanty
‘And the evening wind from over the sea makes that threadbare self billow like a tattered sail, all that resisted it now become the air on which it rises.’
Five Things Right Now: Kelly Link
Kelly Link
Kelly Link, author of Get in Trouble shares five links to what she’s reading, watching and thinking about right now.
Honk Honk to Udvada
Chandrahas Choudhury
‘Oh Uncle, it’s such a historical day,’ said Zahra. ‘The eight hundredth anniversary of our arrival in India after we faced so much persecution in Iran, and we’re going to such a big bash, and all you can think about is emus. What will Dr Billimoria think of our family?’
Cairo: September 2014
Wiam El-Tamami
‘Over the past few months, the government has been ad-libbing the time.’
The Foreign Correspondent
Pallavi Aiyar
‘The absence of Indian foreign correspondents was, and is, unexceptional.’
Performance Art
Manjula Padmanabhan
‘A single pod of cardamom! Was that enough? To flavour an entire life’s pot of time?’
To Recall, To Praise
Spencer Reece
‘What would follow for five years was one of my last relationships forged through letters.’
Song
Silvina Ocampo
‘Oh, nothing, nothing is mine. / I am like the reflections of a gloomy lake / or the echo of voices at the bottom of a blue / well when it has rained.’
Barbara Ras and Matthew Dickman In Conversation
Matthew Dickman & Barbara Ras
‘They happen organically. If a can of Pepsi shows up it’s because I was thinking about a can of Pepsi.’
Fatima Bhutto | My Other Thing
Fatima Bhutto
‘If you happen to be friends with one of the world’s most fearsome food critics, don’t cook for him.’
Five Things Right Now: Carmen Maria Machado
Carmen Maria Machado
Carmen Maria Machado, author of ‘The Husband Stitch’, shares five links to what she’s reading, watching and thinking about right now.
My Chess Teacher
Ricardo Lísias
‘The environment, however, wasn’t a hostile one. Though it was filled with the strangest guys in town, they were only there to play.’
Terror
Kimiko Hahn
‘The lemon shark / who returns to the same mangrove-lined shallows / every year to give birth.’
Five Things Right Now: John Darnielle
John Darnielle
John Darnielle, author of the debut novel Wolf in White Van, shares five links of what he’s reading, watching and thinking about right now.
S.J. Naudé and Ivan Vladislavić In Conversation
S.J. Naudé & Ivan Vladislavić
‘In rapidly transforming societies, writers may lose the space they’ve built their imaginative lives around.’
Orion’s Belt
Cristhiano Aguiar
‘Well, if the Bible, Greek tragedies and Star Wars have taught me something it’s that anything of great importance will eventually come in threes.’
Biographical Detail
Ángel González Muñiz
‘The cockroaches in my house complain because I read at night’.
When Did I Become a Writer?
Mia Couto
‘I am often asked when I became a writer, and I have taken to not rushing my answer.’
The Abyss
Rafael Frumkin
‘I came home this past fall to the Chicago suburb where I’d lived with my parents from age nine until I left for college in 2008, and I moved back into my childhood bedroom.’
Red Space: Promoting a Socialist Destiny
Justin Jampol
Space posters were ‘visually stunning representations of the promises of the Soviet state’.
The Chronicle of the Wrinkled-Face Sheikh
Salman Natour
‘No other inanimate object retains emotion as strongly as keys do. Fingerprints are engraved on them as if the laws of wear and tear do not apply.’
