Zaina Arafat

‘I grew obsessed with the place, thinking that getting to see it, to experience it, would make the pain of that fall go away.’

Chloe Aridjis

‘Yet the little white disks with a dent down the middle are no panacea; whenever I take one of these thought guillotines I feel trapped in a grey zone’.

Paul Auster

‘You can’t remember the precise moment when you understood that you were a Jew.’

An essay by Paul Auster.

John Balaban

‘Her mother planted a garden in Manhattan. / In that garden is a tree. Some look on it and feel restored. / Others, when the wind lifts its leaves, want to scream.’

Ned Beauman

‘Growing up, you got so used to all your secrets being sad or shameful that you came to assume they were, like alkyl halides, intrinsically neurotoxic, and now he had learned for the first time that they weren’t.’

Chanelle Benz

‘Natalia used to be a wife. His name was Erik. His name was Viggo. His name was Christien. His name was Lucas. His name was Nils.’

Lauren Beukes

‘It has taken this to make me realize that de-humanizing is not only something that other people do to you. It can be self-inflicted too.’

Issue 124

Rachael Boast

NoViolet Bulawayo

‘My love affair with books had turned into a marriage.’

NoViolet Bulawayo

‘We are back in Paradise and are now trying to come up with a new game.’

Issue 122

John Burnside

'the trees / are slender in the way that things / are almost, though not quite / absent'

Dan Burt

‘Prostitution, gambling, fencing, contract murder, loan-sharking, political corruption and crime of every sort were the daily trade in Philadelphia’s Tenderloin, the oldest part of town.’

Maria Chaudhuri

‘When my mother practises music, the world is her enemy.’

Catherine Chung

‘The danger with chasing fantasies is that the reality is often so different than the imagination.’