Base Life
Sort by:
What Happened to Us
Humera Afridi
‘Trouble. There’s always trouble of some kind or other bringing the city to a standstill.’
Robert Macfarlane | Podcast
Robert Macfarlane & Rachael Allen
‘When you're dealing with a geological context, its age exceeds your knowing, exceeds your comprehension. Deep time is dizzying and vertiginous.’
Notes from Uzbekistan
Chinelo Okparanta
‘The cultural presentations of the students – that juxtaposition of old and new world, of tradition and modernity.’
Charles Simic | Interview
Charles Simic & Rachael Allen
Charles Simic is one of today's most prolific poets. He speaks with poetry editor Rachael Allen about poetic movements, simple dishes and tragicomedy.
The Captain
Rattawut Lapcharoensap
‘I was with Dora. We were in love. Things were cheap and plentiful and the money from the insurance was going to last us forever.’
The Perfect Last Days of Mr Sengupta
Siddartha Mukherjee
‘The point of lucid death,’ he said, ‘is to retain the consciousness of dying, while blunting the agony of it.’
Nuestra Señora de la Asunción
Lina Wolff
‘No one here is normal except you, and you’re not even from Spain.’
String Theory
Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch
‘On tenterhooks / you think how string constricts, how / it connects, how you followed it back / to Rawtenstall.’
A Rationalist in the Jungle
Héctor Abad
‘A pale-faced, near-sighted urbanite like me is nothing less than handicapped in the heart of the jungle.’
Tour Guide
Archive of Modern Conflict & Phil Klay
‘We record the reality we’re supposed to have, and then go back later and tell ourselves that it was the reality we experienced.’
A Walk to Kobe
Haruki Murakami
‘What I’m talking about is a different sea, and different mountains.’ Haruki Murakami walks to his hometown after the Great Hanshin earthquake of 1995.
Compass Plant
Rachael Boast
One sprig should do, in a wayfarer’s satchel, to assist in losing all bearings until...
Seestück
Steffi Klenz
Artist Steffi Klenz recaptures portraits based on photographs of travellers, explorers and seamen who were lost in open waters, and whose bodies were never recovered.
The Best Hotel
Sonia Faleiro
I The village elder had recommended the hotel. He called it the best hotel in...
Geese
Ellen Bryant Voigt
there is no cure for temperament it’s how we recognize ourselves but sometimes within it...
Water Has No Enemy
Teju Cole
‘The city is a sea that can swallow you at any time, a monster that can lash out without warning, a hell of variables and uncertainties.’
Wudang Mountain
Catherine Chung
‘The danger with chasing fantasies is that the reality is often so different than the imagination.’
There’s a Small Hotel
Andrew Holleran
‘Returning to Manhattan was like seeing someone who’d once been your lover but was now with someone else.’
The Two Gardens
Lorna Gibb
‘There are two gardens in my memory. The first was hidden behind the rows of shabby council houses where I grew up.’
Ross Raisin | On Tour
Ross Raisin
‘I was up at 5.30 this morning, to screaming, and it’s afternoon now and I’m covered in hummus and struggling to muster the energy to remove it from myself.’
Dutch Harbor Nights
Jim Ruland
‘When one of the fishermen starts belting out ‘All My Rowdy Friends Are Coming Out Tonight’, it feels like a prophecy come to life.’
Two Poems
John Balaban
‘Her mother planted a garden in Manhattan. / In that garden is a tree. Some look on it and feel restored. / Others, when the wind lifts its leaves, want to scream.’
Shobasakthi | Best Untranslated Writers
V. V. Ganeshananthan
‘Shobasakthi is also known as Anthony X; he is an ex-militant; he is an expatriate.’
In Cyberspace: a love letter
Joanna Walsh
‘I’m at a cafe table. It doesn’t matter which country. I’ve been travelling for a long time. By train. Nine, ten different countries in thirty days, a couple of nights in each, maybe three at most.’
War Letters
António Lobo Antunes
‘I’m doing my best to survive all this, but sometimes I feel so homesick that words simply empty of meaning.’
A Cloudless Sky
Michael Dickman
‘A cloudless sky and I’m back / an ice-cold sky-blue rag / for my eyes’
Handkerchief
Ghassan Zaqtan
‘Nothing’s left to say between us / everything went / into the train that hid its whistle.’
