Kinder Than Solitude
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Vanishing Virgil
Maaza Mengiste
‘We want to believe that we will die with dignity; that death is a confrontation and the battle is somewhat fair.’
Karen Russell | Interview
Karen Russell & Patrick Ryan
‘I think it’s impossible to draw a hard and fast line between reality and fantasy.’
Dark Night
Ben Okri
‘On a night when my soul was damp / I found in the street a dark lamp. / The moon was cold and green, / The sky had a sinister sheen’
At The Kitchen Table
Peter Orner
‘Your husband dies, you’re a widow. There’s almost joy in it. Why not scream it? Glory.’
The Plano Suicides
Stefan Merrill Block
‘My parents moved us to Plano for the reasons so many move to Plano: jobs, good schools, a town perfectly engineered to render successful families.’
Barely Imagined Beings
Caspar Henderson
‘Monsters of one kind or another are woven into virtually all the cultures of which we have record.’
Preserves for Life
Olga Tokarczuk
‘He came upon one under the kitchen sink labelled ‘Shoestrings in vinegar, 2004’, and that should have alarmed him.’
Face to Face
Tomas Tranströmer
ʻThe birds refused to fly and the soul / grated against the landscape.ʼ
Not Easy to Tell
Patrick Ryan
‘I told him he looked like an assassin in an Elmore Leonard novel, and he smiled.’
José Saramago: a celebration
Margaret Jull Costa
‘It is hard to think of a more imaginative novelist, one whose books are so full of humour and humanity and invention.’
False Blood
Will Self
‘The only real universals are that we all live – and, of course, we all must die.’
Your Birthday Has Come and Gone
Paul Auster
‘For the first time in all the years you had known her, she sounded deranged.’
The Mission
Tom Bamforth
‘It is strange, the rituals we find ourselves carrying out before the unknown.’
She Murdered Mortal He
Sarah Hall
‘Her old lovers were ghosts. None of them had survived; none were missed.’
A Garden of Illuminating Existence
Kanitta Meechubot
‘Witnessing her death, I understand the meaning of love.’
Deng’s Dogs
Santiago Roncagliolo
‘My earliest memory of Peru is a newspaper photograph from 1980 of dead dogs hanging from lamp posts in downtown Lima.’
The Ground Floor
Daniel Alarcón
‘I met Darin Rossi standing in a thick, gooey pool of fake blood, on an early-December night in Los Angeles.’
Insatiable
Mark Doty
‘Behind every man I want to kiss lies that original desire, which it is my nature and my fate to displace.’
The Dune
Stephen King
‘Being able to read obituaries in advance gives a man an extraordinary sense of power.’
About the Cover
Jake and Dinos Chapman
‘My attempts are mocked by the monstrosities that leer up at me from the page.’
Rub Out The Words: Letters from William Burroughs
William Burroughs & James Grauerholz
‘In order to earn my reputation I may have to start drinking my tea from a skull since this is the only vice remaining to me... four pots a day and heavy sugar.’
A Lovely and Terrible Thing
Chris Womersley
‘For a moment I could not speak. I looked off into the bleak distance, then at this man, and there was something about the sad shake of his head and the way his hair flapped about on his scalp that filled me with unreasonable warmth.’
Robert Coover | Podcast
Robert Coover & Ted Hodgkinson
Robert Coover reads his short story ‘Vampire’ and discusses the quintessential English novel and the intersection between myth and the modern world.
Vampire
Robert Coover
‘His wife comes in, baring, with a wink, her incisors, and offers him a Bloody Mary.’
Out of the Tombs
Madison Smartt Bell
‘He had always been curious as to what lay behind the gate: a metal portcullis, of an almost medieval aspect, opposite the corner of Columbus Park.’
Necessary Daemons
Madison Smartt Bell
‘I have claimed, on suitable occasions, that my work is dictated to me by daemons, being careful to include that extra ‘a,’ so that the daemons I’m invoking may seem at least morally neutral, not out and out evil as single ‘e’ demons are mostly considered to be.’
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Toby Litt
‘I began to think, for no particular reason, about what the exact series of events would be were I to die at that moment – before, even, my coffee went cold.’
