‘Strangely, anti-British remarks made me feel patriotic, though I only felt patriotic when I was away from England.’
The man had heard that I was interested in talking about his country, Pakistan, and that this was my first visit. He kindly kept trying to take me aside to talk. But I was already being talked at.
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Alison Smith on the week she spent with Ursula K. Le Guin.
This surreal tale from Haruki Murakami circles a Charlie Parker album that never existed. Translated from the Japanese by Philip Gabriel.
A monastic community persists after a ‘great chaos and collapse’ in this story by the 2018 Nobel Prize for Literature laureate, Olga Tokarczuk. Translated from the Polish by Jennifer Croft
Two poems from Rebecca Tamás’ collection WITCH.
Summer Brennan on high heels, foot-binding, and our ongoing performances of gender.
‘My response to the music had reminded me that concealed inside myself was a more excitable and open self raring to get out.’
‘The warmest companion with the coldest vision of where Humanity might head.’
‘If you think the living are difficult to deal with, the dead can be worse‘.
‘I’d have dumped her if it wouldn’t have caused more problems than it solved.’
‘The through line in my work that I see is how easily we can turn people into the other’
