Sand
Sort by:
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.’
Auto-Suggestion
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.’
Julie Otsuka | Interview
Julie Otsuka & Patrick Ryan
‘Using the ‘we’ voice allowed me to tell a much larger story than I would have been able to tell otherwise.’
Novel Terrors
Yuka Igarashi
‘Violence and genius and terror and mysticism reside in equal parts in the so-called heroes and so-called villains. It wells up and pervades us. We swim in it.’
Dreams in a Time of War
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o
‘I had not had lunch that day and my stomach had already forgotten the breakfast porridge gobbled before my six-mile run to Kĩnyogori Intermediate School.’
Patrick deWitt | Interview
Patrick deWitt & Ted Hodgkinson
‘The question of whether or not I’m addressing America in my writing only comes up with people outside of America.’
Banyan
Robert Olen Butler
‘I wake and it’s dark and a woman is beside me, naked and small, and she is waking too and the room is still heavy with the incense she burned for her dead.’
The Last Days of the Thunderbird
Stefan Merrill Block
‘The only upside of my fresh heartbreak: I’m an adult now! My pain is private adult pain!’
Remembering Tim Hetherington
Michael Salu
‘Each image contained a finely weighed contemplation of a given moment, in all its furious intensity.’
You Want Gunfire With That?
Dan Hind
‘The end of Soviet communism was supposed to have brought with it the end of ideological struggle and even, according to a significant few, history itself.’
