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Alphabet City
Geoffrey Biddle
‘When I first worked here, the neighbourhood was not called Alphabet City. It was the Puerto Rican part of the Lower East Side and the Puerto Ricans called it Loisaida, low-ee-SIGH-da, a new York-Puerto Rican version of Lower East Side.’
America’s Secret War
Leslie Cockburn
‘Morales’s troubles began in the spring of 1984, when he was indicted for conspiracy to import and distribute cocaine. It was this awkward development that made him particularly receptive to the proposal he received from a delegation of Contras and a CIA man that turned up at his Opa-locka office soon after the bad news.’
Amit Chaudhuri | First Sentence
Amit Chaudhuri
‘A scene in which nothing is ostensibly happening will absorb me; so will a paragraph that contains no vital piece of information.’
Amy Bloom | Five Things Right Now
Amy Bloom
Amy Bloom shares five things she’s reading, watching and thinking about right now.
An Ofrenda for my Mother
Sandra Cisneros
‘She was a prisoner-of-war mother, banging on the bars of her cell all her life.’
An Education
Lynn Barber
‘Alan was adept at not answering questions, but actually he rarely needed to, because I never asked them.’
An Education
Lynn Barber
‘The whole meeting seemed completely unreal but then everything at that time seemed unreal, so I said ‘Yes, by all means make the film,’ and went back to the hospital and forgot about her.’
An Irrelevant Parochialism
Frederick Bowers
‘What strikes an ex-patriate most about the contemporary British novel is its conformity, its traditional sameness, and its realistically rendered provincialism.’
An Island Presence
Howard Cunnell
‘I can almost believe in the permanence of these warm days, this unchanging child whose hand fits mine. But I can feel the cold and the darkness coming.’
And Never Come Up
John Biguenet
‘Was there a story? Yes, there was always a story .Did you write this one down? I've written them all down’.
And Yet
Brian Evenson
‘She had waited expectantly for him to tell her a story to illustrate this, and to explain what those values were, but as with so many other things he had left it at that. It lingered in the air, waiting for her to pluck it up, but she had simply let it hang.’
Anecdotes
Ann Beattie
‘Christine’s hair had begun to dry, and she looked different, with her hair down and her glasses on. Her earnestness made her look younger, and took me back to the bar where we’d sat in Pennsylvania years ago.’
