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Stuck in Trees (with Apologies to Ian Frazier)
Jessica Francis Kane
‘On 8 January 2018, I noticed a large bunch of purple balloons in a tree near my apartment building.’
Beetle
Joanna Kavenna
An excerpt from ZED, the forthcoming novel by Joanna Kavenna, a Granta Best of Young British Novelist.
Boxing
Fatima Farheen Mirza
Fatima Farheen Mirza on navigating gender roles in a Muslim family, wearing hijab and learning how to box.
My Mother Pattu
Saraswathy M. Manickam
Saraswathy M. Manickam’s ‘My Mother Pattu’ is the Asian regional winner of the 2019 Commonwealth Short Story Prize.
A Season on Earth
Gerald Murnane
‘He had forgotten in the seminary how many distractions there were in the world.’
The Sole Purveyor of Madame Bovary in Beijing circa 1989
Amanda Lee Koe
‘In the day, his bevy of besotted rustics were coached in maxims of libertarian socialism. By night: rice wine orgies and folk punk sing-alongs.’
The Ungrateful Refugee
Dina Nayeri
‘I was born in 1979, a year of revolution, and grew up in wartime.’ Dina Nayeri on growing up in the Islamic Republic of Iran.
To Zinder
Sven Lindqvist
Obsessed with a single line from Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness – Kurtz’s injunction to ‘Exterminate All the Brutes’ – Sven Lindqvist set out across Central Africa, and wrote a book that revealed precisely what Europe’s imperial powers had exacted on Africa’s people over the course of the preceding two centuries.
Rules for Visiting
Jessica Francis Kane
‘It wasn’t until the end of dinner, when my aunt started clearing and my grandmother demanded another bottle of wine, that I began to understand.’
American Girl and Boy from Shobrakheit
Noor Naga
‘Question: is romance just a father who never carried you to bed carrying you, at last, to bed?’