Amy Bloom

Amy Bloom shares five things she’s reading, watching and thinking about right now.

Lena Andersson

‘Anticipation made it difficult for Ester to swallow.’ Translated from the Swedish by Saskia Vogel.

Esa Aldegheri & Gavin Francis

‘The landscape, glimpsed through plumes of dust thrown up by trucks, grew drier, more hostile as it climbed away from the sea.’

Christine Schutt

‘A wizened spring, the sickly prickly pear and organ pipe cacti were so riddled with holes they might have been targets.’

Christine Schutt

‘The permanence of his absence is a noise she hears when she listens to how quiet.’

Sigrid Rausing

Sigrid Rausing introduces Granta 143: After the Fact.

A.M. Homes

‘He is the War Correspondent, she is the Transgressive Novelist. They have been flown in for the summit on Genocide(S).’

Stephen Sharp

‘Last year father attacked me as a “wet radish”. This caused me to give up writing diary entries.’

Brian Allen Carr

‘I like to think the ones who are worst at coloring will remember me the longest.’

Nathaniel Mackey

Charles Glass & Don McCullin

‘ISIS’s second conquest of Palmyra astonished everyone, and fed the belief in a Syrian government conspiracy to assist ISIS.’

Ho Sok Fong

‘If she’d swerved any harder, she would have crashed right into the lake.’ New fiction by Ho Sok Fong, translated from the Chinese by Natascha Bruce.

Jason Cowley & Gus Palmer

‘They had believed they were coming to a new town. But, they said, Harlow wasn’t new: it looked old.’

Will Harris

‘a man caught my eye as I was about to cross the road / and asked to shake my hand. You have a kind face, he said.’

Edward Burtynsky & Anthony Doerr

‘Often when I stare into the alien circuitry of a Burtynsky picture, it takes me a while to figure out what has actually been photographed.’ Anthony Doerr introduces Edward Burtynsky’s photographs.

David Flusfeder

‘It became a kind of mission to find contemporaries of theirs that weren’t closing down, establishments that have continued to flourish, or at least endure.’

Chelsey Minnis

‘It’s dangerous like a very powerful doorbell. / Or a portrait covered with a blanket.’

Susan Straight

‘The time of the Perseids never varied. That was why Dante’s mother had taught him the stars.’

Sana Valiulina

‘I am my father’s daughter, a former prisoner of war and “suspicious person” who spent ten years in the Gulag.’ Translated from the Russian by Polly Gannon.

Joshua Cohen

‘Each turn he took, there’d be another face. Each concourse held a voice, importuning, beckoning.’

Elias Canetti

‘It was natural that the rumors about both these people should reach me at the same time; they came from the same source, from which everything new for me came at that time.’

Sarah V. Schweig

‘In my crumbling country every day, / people spend their lives standing in lines / to buy designer sneakers.’

Jacques Testard

‘It is clear when reading Svetlana Alexievich that she has a deep empathy for the characters whose stories she tells.’

Andrés Ibáñez

‘The rabbits are gentle and timid – in fact, they behave as rabbits normally do – but nonetheless their size is troubling.’

Carys Davies

‘All good stories are both resonant and concrete; they live in the mind of the reader and reverberate beyond the pages of the book.’

Amy Sackville

‘There are many facets to being a king; and yet all edges must appear burnished to a perfect smooth orb, shining at the centre of his empire.’ An extract from Painter to the King by Amy Sackville.

Rebecca Giggs

‘To be consumed by leeches is to be vital, to be animate, though it is also to be reminded you are something else’s prey, and therefore porous and mortal.’

John Connell

‘I’m going to die out here he thought, I’m going to die trying to save this beast in front of my boy.’

Alicia Kopf

‘My brother is a man trapped in ice. He looks at us through it; he is there and he is not there.’

Pedro Rosa Mendes

‘We hope that the copilot knows the terrain well. That his mask of youth conceals the face of a seasoned veteran of war. That he knows the minefields because he helped plant them.’

Swati Rana

‘Imagine all the prodigal / People, hoping only to / Escape every human mistake.’

Rachel Cusk

An extract from Kudos, the final novel in Rachel Cusk’s trilogy, following Outline and Transit.

Amy Key

‘She is luscious / and plump like marshmallow; part edible baby, / part nosy neighbour.’

Susan Straight

Novelist Susan Straight and photographer Douglas McCulloh on the presidential streets of the ‘real’ Coachella

Elif Batuman

‘I walked along the birch-lined alleys of Yasnaya Polyana, looking for clues. Snakes were swimming in the pond, making a rippling pattern. Everything here was a museum.’

Undinė Radzevičiūtė

An excerpt from ‘Fishes and Dragons’ a Lithuanian literary chinoiserie that addresses the interpretation by a European of Qing dynasty culture and art.