Zadie Smith | Interview
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Nation
Tishani Doshi
‘Understand friend, the conscience is a delicate broth. / Sometimes it feels good to be bad.’
Diminishing Returns
Fatin Abbas
‘Alex had been sent to this remote district between north and south Sudan to update maps. It was an information-gathering project run by an American NGO based in the capital, Khartoum, nine hundred kilometers to the north.’
Crimes of Space
Eyal Weizman & Rana Dasgupta
‘Architecture can be employed as a form of violence and violation.’
Border Documents
Arturo Soto
‘The twin cities of El Paso and Ciudad Juárez lie either side of the US–Mexico border.’
As if in Prayer
Steven Heighton
‘Many of the life vests were useless fakes, nylon shells that the human traffickers had stuffed with bubble wrap, boxboard, sawdust or rags.’
Species
Tishani Doshi
‘Will it be for them / as it was for us, impossible to imagine oceans where there are now / mountains?’
The Lake
Kapka Kassabova
‘The chalky mountain separates the lake from its higher, non-identical twin, but only overground. Underground, they are connected. Ohrid and Prespa: two lakes, one ecosystem.’
Between Light and Storm
Esther Woolfson
‘We’ve always been entwined in life and in death with other creatures, although often too much time has elapsed to be able to interpret with any certainty what some of these symbols and artefacts mean.’
Click-Wrap
Ida Börjel
‘You know about my / emotional drinking, and my night walks and my / fragmented heart-to-heart conversations.’
All Species Have the Same Life
Emanuele Coccia
‘I have in me the vestiges of an endless series of living beings, all born of other living beings.’
Cosmos
Tishani Doshi
‘Remember when we were / young and the end was a black hole at the edge of forever, / a million light years away.’
Clarity
Ruchir Joshi
‘I was close to my own father, which many people are not.’
Ruchir Joshi remembers his son.
Words for Woman
Susana Moreira Marques
‘What we need, now, is: Mrs Dalloway in London, but as an immigrant’
How much faith can we place in coronavirus antibody tests?
Megan Price, Morgan Agnew & David Peters
Why is it so hard to roll out accurate antibody tests? Statisticians break down the challenges that come with testing for coronavirus immunity.
In Conversation
Saskia Vogel & Jen Calleja
‘Narrative is control, dominance, purposeful withholding, flirting’
What History Tells Us About Epidemics
Sandra Hempel
‘From when we first began living together in settlements, bacteria and viruses were with us, replicating, mutating and jumping species with extraordinary agility.’
Fable
Kathryn Scanlan
‘The girl’s curiosity often led her into troublesome situations, but she considered it part of the pact her soul had made in order to gain entrance to the world, and did not worry much over what befell her.’
New fiction from Kathryn Scanlan.
The Smart House of Mrs O
Lincoln Michel
‘I looked around at my apartment, wondering if there was anything gazing back.’
New fiction from Lincoln Michel.
War and Virus
Vesna Maric
‘Wars, national disasters and pandemics do not cause social disintegration – they reveal it, and deepen it.’
Vesna Maric on the difference between wars and viruses.
The Pandemic, Our Common Story
Anna Badkhen
Anna Badkhen was researching Eden – the origins of humanity in the Afar Triangle of East Africa – when coronavirus broke out across the world.
In Conversation
Kathryn Scanlan & Kate Zambreno
‘When a day is not structured by appointments, meetings, driving to work, taking lunch, driving home, shopping (i.e. capitalism), its soft, loose (wild?) shapelessness becomes apparent.’
Exciting Times
Naoise Dolan
‘There was something Shakespearean about imperious men going down on you: the mighty have fallen.’
Naoise Dolan’s Exciting Times is shortlisted for the 2020 Young Writer of the Year Award.
In Conversation
Jenny Offill & Mark O'Connell
‘This isn’t the end of the world. It’s history going about its business. This isn’t the last apocalypse by a long shot.’
Jenny Offill, author of Weather, talks to Mark O’Connell, author of Notes from the Apocalypse.
Three Poems
Hannah Regel
‘It makes no difference / If the devil has been defeated or if it is your character’
The Shrouds on the Glacier du Rhône
Simon Norfolk & Klaus Thymann & Francis Hodgson
Photographs of the Rhône Glacier by Simon Norfolk and Klaus Thymann, with an introduction by Francis Hodgson.
Più Vivo
Diane Williams
‘You’ve seen I’m sure a performer on stage stock-still – during which time he waits for his ovation. This is how I am these days.’
New fiction from Diane Williams.
The Lessons We Choose
Beth Gardiner
This will not be the last crisis. What can we learn from this one?
Plague Diary: March
Gonçalo M. Tavares
A coronavirus diary from the Portuguese writer Gonçalo M. Tavares, translated by Daniel Hahn.
Farm Tennis
Rob Magnuson Smith
‘Nobody bothered him when he was playing tennis. No matter how long he stayed out there, the door never took breaks.’
Fiction by Rob Magnuson Smith.
Interview
Jon Fosse
‘To me writing is a kind of listening. I don’t know what I am listening to, but I am listening!’
