Mirage
Sort by:
Oak
Jamie McKendrick
‘When my father saw an advert in the Echo / for a big house at a peppercorn rent / he rang.’
That Whole London Thing
A.L. Kennedy
‘But London has always been impossible and yet possible and has always called me.’
Dividing the Kingdom
Pico Iyer
‘I get on the train to hear the funereal call of my boyhood: ‘Reading, Didcot Parkway, Oxford.’’
Rajesh Parameswaran | Interview
Rajesh Parameswaran & Yuka Igarashi
‘I could tell you that love and violence are basic forces interwoven through all of nature and human affairs, and that’s why I mix the two.’
Shen Congwen: A Letter
Alice Xin Liu & Shen Congwen
‘Shen’s novels, which had him often referred to as the Chinese William Faulkner, had a pastoral quality that did not serve a political purpose.’
Flying Towards a Country of Rain
Wang Yin
‘Paper phantoms sit beside me / watching a two-hour movie.’
Dutch Landscapes
Mishka Henner
‘There is of course an absurdity to these censored images since their overt, bold and graphic nature only draws attention to the very sites that are meant to be hidden.’
The Reader and Technology
Toby Litt
‘Literature isn’t alien to technology, literature is technological to begin with.’
The Day Etta Died
John Burnside
‘I was marking a stack of essays / on Frank O’Hara / and each had a Wiki- / paragraph to say / who Genet was.’
Andrés Neuman | Podcast
Andrés Neuman & Ted Hodgkinson
‘During the four hours they spent alone three times a week, Hans and Sophie alternated between books and bed, bed and books, exploring one another in words and reading one another’s bodies.’
The Slight Difference Between Leaving and Running Away
Andrés Neuman
‘Like him, the bathroom mirror had lost brightness over the years.’
A Gentle Madness
Humera Afridi
‘Pakistan is a nation of memory keepers. We feed our memories as if they are guests at tea, pay homage to them.’
My Mother, My Translator
Jaspreet Singh
‘Through that fuzzy mix of fiction/non-fiction she had told me the problematic stuff we avoid going near when we get together.’
Refugee Dreams
Peter Behrens
‘In his mind he is back in Frankfurt once more, trying to catch that last train across the frontier.’
Jeanette Winterson | Podcast
Jeanette Winterson & Saskia Vogel
Jeanette Winterson reads from her new memoir, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal, and her story ‘All I Know About Gertrude Stein’ from Granta 115: The F Word.
Catherine Chung | Interview
Catherine Chung & Patrick Ryan
‘I think that my appreciation of what’s considered beautiful or elegant in math definitely carried over into what I appreciate in other fields as well. ’
God Bless You, 2011
Hiromi Kawakami
‘If the god of uranium really exists, then what must he be thinking? Were this a fairy tale of old, what would happen when humans broke the laws of nature to turn gods into minions?’ Hiromi Kawakami on the nature gods of Japan.
Tea Water
Gyrdir Eliasson
‘We sat on the little stools under the window and watched Grandma in her dress with the red roses on it, against the backdrop of the blue-painted kitchen.’
Dad’s the Word
Soumya Bhattacharya
‘There is no escaping the fact that parenting involves treasuring those rare moments of solitude.’
Edmund White | Interview
Edmund White & Patrick Ryan
‘Although I was trying for the big-city and suburban realism of Yates, I didn’t mind adding a bit of fairy dust in the dialogue.’
Runs Girl | New Voices
Chinelo Okparanta
‘The year Mama fell sick was the year Njideka confessed to me that she was a runs girl.’
Hari Kunzru | Interview
Hari Kunzru & Ted Hodgkinson
‘It was interesting to me how readily UFOs can be mapped onto a spiritualism, Madame Blavatsky and so on.’
Self-Consciousness: Memoirs by John Updike
Edmund White
‘The freedom conferred by masks. Children and current wives cannot blame you for what your characters do and say.’
Self-Portrait as Amnesiac
John Burnside
‘Shoeboxes lined with eggs and empty / pomegranates drying in a bowl, / mousebones and wicker, chess pieces, muddled coats.’
Home
John Burnside & et al
Home is makeshift. Everything we build, everything we name, everything we hold dear and would not have taken from us is temporary and in constant need of re-imagining.
John Barth | Podcast
John Barth
John Barth discusses discovering William Faulkner and Lawrence Sterne as a student, the parallels between writing and arranging music, what happened to postmodernism and waiting for the muse to call.
