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Binyavanga
Pwaangulongii Dauod
‘There are many writers, including myself, who owe their careers to Binyavanga. He was the most generous writer of his generation.’
Pwaangulongii Dauod remembers the late Binyavanga Wainaina.
Notes on Craft
Naoise Dolan
‘If something is usually done in novels, but I can’t actively justify doing it, then I don’t do it.’
You Are Here, You Are Not a Ghost
Mark Doty
‘Does it make you a little ghostly yourself, when what’s gone is more present for you than what’s here?’
Daughter of Radium
Joe Dunthorne
‘As a child, my grandmother brushed her teeth every day with radioactive toothpaste.’
The Third Rainbow Girl
Emma Copley Eisenberg
‘I felt ruined by my time in Pocahontas County – no other place would ever be so good.’
An excerpt from Emma Copley Eisenberg’s The Third Rainbow Girl.
Five Images from the Life of Georg Trakl
Mathias Énard
‘We think we see Georg Trakl in this last photograph but we do not see him.’
Open Bookkeeping
Jenny Erpenbeck
‘I write an obituary that appears in the newspaper that she always used to read while drinking her afternoon tea. I receive €170.03 for the obituary.’
Translated from the German by Kurt Beals.
The Dragon’s Den
Tim Flannery
‘Just imagine the Australian inland with herds of rhino-sized diprotodon, as well as other gigantic marsupials, being preyed on by marsupial lions and Komodo dragons.’
The Wolf at the Door
Cal Flyn
‘Wolves brook no bureaucracy. They do not believe in borders. It has been years since we have come face to face with apex predators in our own country.’
Feeling Bullish: On My Great-Uncle, Gay Matador and Friend of Hemingway
Rafael Frumkin
‘In his suit, with his pigtail and his montera, he was pure potential: he could be masculine vanquisher or gold-embroidered fairy. He was both, actually, at all times, and nobody who came to see him fight thought any less of him for it.’
The Lessons We Choose
Beth Gardiner
This will not be the last crisis. What can we learn from this one?