Late in Life
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Somalia Then and Now
Mary Harper
‘Madam, you are a potential terrorist. You and every other person in this room.’
Crossbones
Nuruddin Farah
‘In a world in which coercion is the norm, a human trafficker must have underlings as well.’
In a Land of Silence
Janine di Giovanni
‘She tells me that he died because he refused to be silent.’
The Terminal Check
Pico Iyer
‘The world is all mixed up these days, and America can no longer claim immunity.’
Laikas I
Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer
‘Hilary hadn’t wanted to acknowledge A: herself as dog-lady; B: any problems re wolves or whatever.’
The American Age, Iraq
Anthony Shadid
‘Nothing really escapes the detritus of death in this wreck of a city.’
Veterans of a Foreign War
Elliott Woods
‘If they’re willing to do this for their country then I should be willing to make the same sacrifices.’
Jihad Redux
Declan Walsh
‘American patience snapped, and Washington took matters into its own hands.’
Of Moustaches and Megalomaniacs
Alia Malek
‘Proper syllabic emphasis was mere collateral damage in the war crescendo of the global coalition that would eventually rumble with Iraq.’
Today is a Sunny Day
Porochista Khakpour
‘For the past ten years I have been trying to write about the events that occurred on 9/11.’
The Politics of Grief
V. V. Ganeshananthan
‘It is a way of humiliating people, to say that their dead are not dead, to say that people are not even allowed to mourn.’
Letters to Omar
Edmund Clark
‘His mail became part of the control process his interrogators exercised.’
Post-Elegy
Wayne Miller
‘After the plane went down, / the cars sat for weeks in long-term parking. / Then, one by one, they began to disappear / from among the cars of the living.’
1911, The Other Revolution
Isabel Hilton
‘Anniversaries, of course, can be a two-edged sword: they invite historical reappraisal.’
Vision
Susan Power
‘I am the unlikely interlacing of two families who never thought their histories would braid together.’
The Death of His Excellency, The Ex-Minister
Nawal El Saadawi
‘A minister like myself had to be vigilant, both in body and mind, in order to retrieve correct facts from incorrect information.’
OIF
Phil Klay
‘A few months later I was strapped up, M4 in condition 1, surrounded by 03s, backpack full of cash, twitchiest guy in Iraq.’
John Burnside | Interview
John Burnside & Rachael Allen
‘Marx said the forest only echoes back what you shout into it – and this is very often true, perhaps more often than not, but I think the poet’s task is to suggest that it needn’t be.’
Memory and Invention
Mavis Gallant
‘When I happened to be working all day, every day, on a story set in the Paris of 1953, I was stunned and bewildered to step outside and discover the shape of the cars, the casual clothing and clean facades of the 1990s.’
The Blazing Light in August
Gabriel Gbadamosi
‘The basic social contract that I won’t break the law by being in a riot and that, in return, my society will keep me safe is being ripped apart in this confrontation with the hard reality of violence: we must break them or they will break us.’
The Burden of Light
Jessica Thummel
‘Jelly sits on the toilet, folded over, staring at his feet still inches from the floor.’
Resist: A Letter from Greece
Natalie Bakopoulos
‘This June, I arrived in Athens just in time for a strike that had halted the metro from the airport to the city.’
The Golden Goat to Communist Ratio
Miroslav Penkov
‘Few people can pinpoint where Bulgaria is on the map. Some people might tell you they can, but you shouldn’t believe them.’
Cupcake
Yana Punkina
‘His voice had long since lost all superfluous timbral embellishments, he was left with only the raw thread of screeching.’
Returning to the Hague
Georgi Tenev
‘‘Shall I tell you, son,’ I ask him, ‘exactly what I’m guilty of?’’
The Gadulka is Burning
Rayko Baychev
‘If they tell you there’s no instrument more thankless than the gadulka, you better believe it.’
