Issue 132

Oliver Bullough

‘A woman asked the steward behind the registration desk if our flight to Moscow was domestic or international. “We are still working on that,” the man answered.’

Rachel Cusk

‘The gears of life had gone into reverse.’

Issue 72

Robyn Davidson

’Shortly after its publication in 1980 I was surprised to learn that I had written a travel book’.

Issue 98

Javier Cercas

‘My name is Javier Cercas, just like you.’

Issue 500

René Belletto

Issue 59

René Belletto

‘Having told his story, the thief had said goodbye to Agnès, regretfully, she thought’.

Alexander Chee

‘He left for the US while his father was away on business so he couldn’t stop him.’

Diana Athill

‘She thought of herself as a rational woman, but while she could sleep alone in an empty house for night after night without worrying, there were other nights when her nerves twitched like a rabbit's at the least sound.’

Issue 151

Emanuele Coccia

‘I have in me the vestiges of an endless series of living beings, all born of other living beings.’

Jim Crace

‘Leonard Lessing does not dream of Maxie Lemon, Maxim Lermontov, the hostage­-taker.’

Issue 14

William Boyd

‘From the small terrace at Cherry's villa there is a perfect view of Villefranche and its bay, edged by the bright beads of the harbour lights and headlamps of cars on the coast road.’

Issue 37

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.’

Liadan Ní Chuinn

‘So maybe I knew for a while that I loved my boyfriend’s family and not him.’

Fiction by Liadan Ní Chuinn.

Issue 22

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.’