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Zagreb
Dubravka Ugrešić
‘‘We’ll print your book if you bring us 140 kilos of paper,’ says my friend, a publisher. ‘Where can I find 140 kilos of paper?’ ‘I don’t know. That’s your problem, you’re the writer.’’
A question of identity
Dubravka Ugrešić
‘One of the first things a child learns is the sentiment: My country is… And so begins the homeland briefing that lasts from the cradle to the grave.’
Life and Breasts
Ludmila Ulitskaya
‘Death is here, by our side, and we can make no witty Nabokovian jokes about it.’
Ludmila Ulitskaya | On Europe
Ludmila Ulitskaya
‘It seems clear to me that during the past ten years, Russia has reached the apex of its estrangement from Europe.’ Translated from the Russian by Polly Gannon.
Best Book of 2010: Mr Chartwell, by Rebecca Hunt
Emma Jane Unsworth
‘Hunt writes with brio, the visceral often blooming into the mystical.’
Naples is Closed
Barry Unsworth
‘Naples had always been high on the list of places I wanted to visit‘.
Getting The Words Out
John Updike
‘No, it is not confrontation but some wish to avoid it, some hasty wish to please, that betrays my flow of speech.’
Italo Calvino
John Updike
‘Post-modernism, if it can be said to exist at all, had in Calvino its most seductive showman.’
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.
L.A. Diary: Notes from a Mexikorean Country
Juan Pablo Villalobos
‘I was reassured to see that my hotel does not resemble the one in The Shining.’
Seminarians
Marcos Villatoro
‘The seminary building, parked smack in the middle of the campus, looked west to Davis Hall (women), south to another women's dorm building, and east to the vocationless, unharnessed men of Beast Hall. What did they expect, with so many earthly reminders of flesh around us? Out of the fourteen young men who discerned the call, few, very few, made it to ordination.’
