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Best Book of 1999: Ai’s Vice

Jillian Weise

‘I love Ai’s work because it gives me permission and reminds me that poetry invented fiction. I needed that in 1999 and I need it today.’

Clean

Matt Young

An excerpt from Matt Young's memoir Eat The Apple, which explores his three deployments to Iraq as a member of the US Marine Corps.

Common Cyborg

Jillian Weise

‘I’m nervous at night when I take off my leg. I wait until the last moment before sleep to un-tech because I am a woman who lives alone’

Five are the fingers, and five are the sins

Rebecca Watson

Rebecca Watson on the life of the man who prototyped fascism, the Italian writer Gabriele D’Annunzio

Kings of the Yukon

Adam Weymouth

An extract from Adam Weymouth’s Kings of the Yukon, winner of the Sunday Times / Peters Fraser + Dunlop Young Writer of the Year Award in association with the University of Warwick

Magpie

Esther Woolfson

‘His life was one of calculation and endeavour, of learning and watching, remembering and trying.’

On the Trouble of Bound Association

Lisa Wells

‘We cannot know our era as it’s unfolding.’

Root and Branch

Sana Valiulina

‘I am my father’s daughter, a former prisoner of war and “suspicious person” who spent ten years in the Gulag.’ Translated from the Russian by Polly Gannon.

Speedy

Evie Wyld

‘Speedy wanted to swallow the world.’

The Unpunished Vice

Edmund White

‘Reading is at once a lonely and an intensely sociable act.’