Issue 129

Will Self

Striking the keys of the same typewriter that once sat under J.G. Ballard’s fingers, Will Self reimagines the legendary writer’s last days.

Mona Simpson

‘He took my left hand and banded a cleft rose petal over my third finger. I knew before looking in the book. ‘Marrying,’ he said. He’s so young, I was thinking.’

Issue 97

ZZ Packer

‘No bullet, no recoil, no shot.’

Anita Sethi

‘At four o’clock in the morning, when Louis de Bernières has lines of poetry repeating in his head which won’t stop gnawing away, he writes them down.‘

Issue 30

Mikhail Steblin-Kamensky

‘Alexander Ivanovich woke at six, the hour when radio broadcasting would normally have begun, but the radio had been silent for a month now.’

Issue 43

Nicholas Shakespeare

‘At five in the afternoon, the Bahia de Abyla sailed out of Algeciras.‘

Issue 92

John Ryle

‘This is worth remembering: if it were not for Africa we would not be here at all.’

Issue 119

Robin Robertson

Issue 21

Patrick Süskind

‘Early one August evening, when most people had already left the park, two men sat confronting one another across a chessboard.’

Mary Ruefle

‘Those flowers belong to the dead.’

Neil Steinberg

Miroslav Penkov

‘Few people can pinpoint where Bulgaria is on the map. Some people might tell you they can, but you shouldn’t believe them.’

Issue 131

Sandra Simonds

‘Here I am. Sephora, symbol of stolen work.’

Issue 16

Oliver Sacks

‘Deprived of continuity, of a quiet, continuous, inner narrative, he is driven to a sort of narrational frenzy: hence his ceaseless tales, his confabulations, his mythomania.’