The Man at the River
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Saturday Night
Lavinia Greenlaw
‘Do they dance for those creatures / whose unmade selves / come unbuttoning out of the dark?’
Labyrinths
A.L. Kennedy
‘I was tempted to let the pages blow overboard and start again...But they have very stern laws about littering at sea.’
A Norwegian Nightmare
Alf Kjetil Walgermo
‘Could we somehow have avoided feeding the killer at our own breast?’
Black Bazaar
Alain Mabanckou
‘Roger The French-Ivorian understood that I didn’t appreciate his tone of voice and ordered two Pelforts to win me back.’
Letter from Naples
David McConnell
Photo by Darrell Crawford Before coming to Naples I visited Shirley Hazzard in New York....
Letter from Greece
Meaghan Delahunt
‘The only thing between Greece and total collapse is the Greek family.’
Stacks
Ted Hodgkinson
‘There are few things worse than being rebuked by the very books you have promised yourself you will read.’
Ali the Muscle
Johnny West
‘All individuality is collapsed by the dog-eat-dog language of ‘us and them’ into a choice between one of two separate, irreconcilable identities.’
Still Lifes from a Vanishing City
Elizabeth Rush
‘An insight into how we might live in a city that was built by an unsustainable system, and how those ‘less-than-fortunate’ people have made their lives out of what others have left behind.’
My Caine Prize Year
Olufemi Terry
‘I came away from these sessions convinced that I was no authority on my work, nor did I have any desire to be.’
Marcelo Ferroni | Interview
Marcelo Ferroni & John Freeman
‘There’s a vibrant new generation of writers, trying to do something very different with Brazilian literature.’
Edwidge Danticat | Interview
Edwidge Danticat & Ellah Allfrey
‘I am a writer who is shaped by everything that I have experienced and loved, including Haiti.’
The End of the Discussion
Patrick Ryan
‘I just never thought I’d see the day when Amtrak would start poisoning people.’
God and Fiction
Aleksandar Hemon & Stuart Dybek
‘Do writers of fiction have to create a cosmology in order to exist?’
Notes for a Young Gentleman
Toby Litt
‘A gentleman should greet with genuine warmth only the following persons – his sister’s daughters, his maternal aunts and his mortal enemies.’
Emily Berry | Interview
Emily Berry & Rachael Allen
‘I’m not even very comfortable being defined as a female poet. You never hear about ‘male poets’.’
The Old Fuel
Emily Berry
‘And I'm / cranking out oodles of love the way an old spaghetti machine / cranks out spaghetti.’
Paolo Zaninoni | Interview
Paolo Zaninoni & John Freeman
‘After almost three years of economic recession and youth unemployment estimated at around twenty per cent, it is fair to say that Italian attitudes towards work have become more serious.’
I’m more the drunken slut kind of feminist, or A Treatise on Political Philosophy at the Apex of American Empire
Megan Levad
‘Out of the Zeitgeist / and onto the party barge.’
Generations
Rebecca Swift
‘Yet Grandma did talk to me that afternoon, and it was as if a wild flower had grown out of the rubble, survived for a day and then disappeared.’
Taiye Selasi | Interview
Yuka Igarashi & Taiye Selasi
‘I was rather surprised to discover that I’d painted such a devastating portrait.’
Accidental
Sadaf Halai
‘Of the 36 views of Fuji, this one is the strangest: / the great wave off Kanagawa, frozen and tempestuous, / both sound and silence.’
Marriage Lessons from My Turkish Grandmother
Sevil Delin
‘The stories my grandmother, my anneanne, told me when I was a child are anything but children’s stories. They are folktales that have a common theme – the triumph of wily wives over evil husbands (jealous, repressive skinflints) through crafty subterfuge.’
Fortunate It Is If Her Skirts Do Not Catch Fire
Amy Gerstler
‘I must remember god is not my private / secretary.’
Reading Women
Rachel Genn, Hannah Gersen & Tess Lynch
‘I realized that she was rebelling against a society that asked her to be noble when she was actually pissed off.’
Independent Foreign Fiction Prize Special
Santiago Roncagliolo & Nell Freudenberger
‘Santiago Roncagliolo seems utterly unconcerned with whether we like his two characters, and (as in life) that fact makes them irresistible.’
Suddenly
Victoria Redel
‘A month after turning forty-five, every last egg in her body is a Rockette doing the can-can.’
