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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.’
Wiam El-Tamami | Interview
Wiam El-Tamami & Ted Hodgkinson
‘So you see, translators tread a tricky tightrope between capturing the full implications of the Arabic while creating an English text that flows smoothly and doesn’t sound overwrought, dated, or downright melodramatic.’
Gothic Night
Mansoura Ez Eldin
‘He wrote: they called it the city of eternal sun. Its sun set only after the last inhabitant slept, and rose before the first got up. They were all deprived of the night. They were not even aware of its existence.’
Undoing the folded lie: Poetry after 9/11
Rachael Allen
‘The real feeling of a day that changed everything forever is boiled down so incessantly, and so often, to cliché.’
Airports: Frontier Nations
Andrés Neuman
‘1.In the waiting area of the Málaga airport for departing flights, a flock of birds nests on the beams. They fly back and forth across the high ceiling.’
Insomnia
A.L. Kennedy
‘After dinner and schoolwork and dog-walking and the rest, even if I’d put the light out and laid myself down for definite rest, little ideas and scraps and nonsenses would tickle in and start to shake me. They would make the nights too bright to resist.’
David Guterson | Interview
David Guterson & John Freeman
‘Hubris, power, sex, ambition, frailty, pathos, descent, castigation: there but for the grace of gods go I, and as long as it isn’t me, great!’
Nadia Shira Cohen | Interview
Nadia Shira Cohen & Michael Salu
‘What I do hope is to be able to tell people’s stories, people who might otherwise have been forgotten by society, locally and otherwise.’
The Heartland: Ten Years After 9/11
Frank Bill
‘‘You think 9/11 changed that, how crimes are committed?’ ‘9/11 changed how Americans live. Period.’’
Jongwe, the cockerel of liberation
Kevin Bloom
‘There’s nothing of interest at ground level, no great revelations. Just the rooster keeping watch in the sky; jongwe, the cockerel of the liberation movement.’
Amir’s Iraq
Marie-Hélène Carleton & Micah Garen
An Iraqi teacher, author and interpreter shares his perspective on a country recovering from trauma.
I had wondered about the signs of burning
John Kinsella
‘None of it made sense. The house shows / no signs – the old core of the house as it is now – / of fire, of giving up the ghost.’
An Occupation
Adam Stumacher
‘All those years of manipulating the tuning crank have given him the patience to settle in for these more involved jobs, and patience is perhaps the most important quality in a human shield.’
Feeding the Fire: The Political Context of 9/11
Adam Haslett
‘9/11 was the bullet to the powder keg of an already heated domestic conflict.’
At War With Writing About War
Gabe Hudson
‘Perhaps a more precise and academicish moniker for War Literature would be, Suicide Averted In Favour of Writing.’
Two Minutes Too Long
Urvashi Butalia
‘What did our government mean by asking us to mourn for these deaths in America?’
The Ghost Children of the North
Bina Shah
‘‘I asked him what the four seasons of the year were’, she says, ‘and he replied, ‘sardi, garmi, hangama, hartal’’. (Winter, summer, riots, strikes.)’
Double Vision: The ‘Other’ Twin Towers
Christopher Merrill
‘Two pairs of towers celebrating economic might, two visions of modernity: a double-sided mirror of the international order.’
Madison, Mon Amour
Patrick Ryan
‘I left the office just in time to get to Penn Station, find my track and hop onto my train. We pulled out into an afternoon grey and heavy with rain.’
Abbottabad Pastoral
Humera Afridi
‘Until now, I had never experienced a disaster, or witnessed mass suffering and death close up.’
A Spell For Going Safely Forth By Day
Jynne Martin
‘The hunter pushes a bullet beneath his tongue to fix his aim, / or is it to stave off his thirst?
War’s Body
Rikki Ducornet
‘Born of genocide and slavery, our democracy staggers beneath a failure to acknowledge and address its own defining brutal impulse.’
The Trouble with the Horses
Patrick deWitt
‘We did not believe in naming horses but they were given to us as partial payment for the last job with the names intact, so that was that.’
Unplanned Road Trip
David Guterson
‘I had a dark, journalistic interest in Ground Zero but also, apprehension.’
Patrick deWitt | Interview
Patrick deWitt & Ted Hodgkinson
‘Names are always hard to come by for me, which can be maddening, because it’s an ever-looming question mark when I’m trying to bring a character into focus. And oftentimes it’s the name that solidifies someone in my mind.’
Samantha Smith | Interview
Samantha Smith & Ted Hodgkinson
‘To write this memoir, I’ve had to open old wounds and go back to them again and again.’
To Stand in the Shadow
Samantha Smith
‘I orient myself in time with ‘before’ and ‘after’, using September 11 as a placemarker.’
War and Peace on the Big Sandy River
Dean H. King
‘Far from the canyons of lower Manhattan or the rugged peaks of Afghanistan, 9/11 led to an unexpected breakthrough in an ancient feud.’
