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Love After Abuse
Lucia Osborne-Crowley
Lucia Osborne-Crowley on the complexity of navigating sexuality while recovering from sexual abuse.
Nina Leger | Notes on Craft
Nina Leger
‘To say nothing about her was the only way to allow her to be everything.’
Bookshelves: John Berger in My Family Album
Amitava Kumar
‘The contours of the family arranged on the bookshelf shifted.’
Karen Olsson | Notes on Craft
Karen Olsson
Karen Olsson shares her notes on the craft of writing: ‘Every book is an unsolvable problem, and yet every time I convince myself I’m just on the verge of cracking it.’
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.’
Boxing
Fatima Farheen Mirza
Fatima Farheen Mirza on navigating gender roles in a Muslim family, wearing hijab and learning how to box.
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.
Tadpoles
Primo Levi
‘It was a harsh and brutal puberty: the tiny creatures began to fret, as if an inner sense had forewarned them of the torment in store’
The Snow in Ghana
Ryszard Kapuściński
‘We always carry it to foreign countries, all over the world, our pride and our powerlessness.’ Translated from the Polish by William Brand.
Dreams for Hire
Gabriel García Márquez
‘The wave had erupted with such force that it obliterated the glass lobby.‘ Translated from the Spanish by Nick Caistor.