Vladimir in Love
Sort by:
The Love Machine
Julia Elliott
‘Beatrice was my first love. The dark contours of her delicate skeleton, the glowing flesh made translucent by my X-ray gaze, drove me crazy.’
Two Poems
Hoa Nguyen
‘I wrote ‘valley’ when I meant ‘longing’ / Your laugh a river A trout kind of green.’
Mona Simpson | First Sentence
Mona Simpson
‘A year later, still in third person, I’d taken five days off my character’s long wait. I’d moved to present tense, though, for more immediacy.’
Five Things Right Now: Sarah Thornton
Sarah Thornton
Sarah Thornton, author of 33 Artists, 3 Acts, shares five links of what she’s reading, watching and thinking about right now.
Blood Is Usually Red
Katherine Faw Morris
‘A lot of babies were born in skiffs during storms, their umbilical cords cut with rusty pocketknives.’
Women’s Shadow in the American Western
Thirza Wakefield
‘The wild is no place for women—the film would seem to say.’
Melinda Moustakis | First Sentence
Melinda Moustakis
‘We all would like to think that with one line, one brush, we could make a reader fall madly in love, and there are writers that elicit such a response with the appropriately gorgeous.’
Jill
Darcey Steinke
‘I had a new persona I’d been planning to introduce the first day of school: a girl wise beyond her years who was not at all nerdy or spastic or prone to crying jags.’
Alan Warner | Five Things Right Now
Alan Warner
Granta Best Young British Novelist, Alan Warner, shares five things he’s reading, watching and thinking about right now.
Introduction: American Wild
Sigrid Rausing
When I was seventeen, in 1980, I went on an American road trip with my...
Thing with Feathers that Perches in the Soul
Anthony Doerr
‘It has to be love, doesn’t it? In however many of its infinite permutations?’
Exotics
Callan Wink
‘He’d come to tell her that he was leaving. It seemed rather impossible now – the telling, not the leaving.’
River So Close
Melinda Moustakis
‘She’s a good-for-nothing chummer. If she survives a week on the slime line without cutting off her thumb or slicing her wrist, she’s hired.’
The Fighters
David Treuer
‘When he stepped into the cage he was doing battle with a disease. The disease was the feeling of powerlessness that takes hold of even the most powerful.’
A Confession
Jess Row
‘I walk out of the theatre in a daze. I’ve glimpsed something. But a glimpse, as it turns out, is not enough.’
Casta
Nicola Lo Calzo
An investigation of how historical racial factors shape memory, heritage and political and interpersonal relations in Louisiana and Mississippi.
A Meeting of Minds with Henry David Thoreau
Andrew Motion
‘What am I doing here more than looking – / which I would stop / only to help things through their vanishing’
Chasing Wolves in the American West
Adam Nicolson
‘It is the wildest part of the American South-West and, in a way, its most beautiful.’
Mitakuye Oyasin
Aaron Huey
‘Today the Oglala Lakota live in the shadow of Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.’
Beyond Sunset
Mary Ruefle
‘Red sadness never appears sad . . . it appears in flashes of passion, anger, fear, inspiration and courage, in dark unsellable visions; it is an upside down penny concealed beneath a tea cosy.’
Grandma and Me
Thomas McGuane
‘Barring weather or a World Series game, on Sundays I’d pick up a nice little box lunch from Mustang Catering and take Grandma some place that smelled good.’
Krapp Hour
Anne Carson
‘Funny to end up here you may think, in this line of work, did I back into it, well more or less.’
The Mast Year
Diane Cook
‘Sounds like a mast year . . . it’s a thing that happens to trees. But sometimes it happens to people too.’
Mirage
Claire Vaye Watkins
‘He had a mind to surf through all crises and shortages and conflicts past and present.’
Never did amount to anything
Dorothea Lasky
‘Hi there, dear sister, I’m sad / But here to tell you / That you never did amount to anything’
Girl on Girl
Diane Cook
‘Marni on Mack. Mack in Marni. A little Mack and Marni. My head rushes. I want to watch, hear the sounds.’
Quarter Past Midnight
Marie-Helene Bertino
‘Flute-like, gauze-filled, late-afternoon sunshine. Rainbow bracelets on the carpet. They use their tongues to wet their lips. Girls.’
Be Careful with that Fan
Andre Perry
‘I was stuck in Texas for a month. The days passed like slow-motion films.
The Ambivalent
Paulo Scott
‘He not only sees the World Cup as a ceasefire, but also as a series of sleights of hand that hide what’s really going on, political debauchery, spin and chicanery.’
