Issue 124

Rachael Boast

Cristhiano Aguiar

‘Rabbits running across a campus and a beer named Hobgoblin: these are two of the topics noted in my small travel notebook.’

Issue 125

Thomas McGuane

‘You’re in a different world when your own mother doesn’t recognize you, or thinks you’re the stranger who gave her a hickey.’

Dan Rhodes & Ted Hodgkinson

‘My work tends to be about people who struggle to understand what’s going on around them. I can’t think why that would be.’

David McConnell & Patrick Ryan

‘These were deranged acts but they were ultimately based on something that’s historically been treated as a social good, the sense of personal honour.’

David Searcy

‘When I was a kid, my family doctor, right through high school, was this wonderful, funny guy with a little Boston Blackie moustache who looked a lot like Burgess Meredith.’

David Szalay & Ted Hodgkinson

David Szalay on how spending time in Hungary makes it easier to write about London, trying to live off betting on horses and how memory informs his work.

Khademul Islam

‘I slowly went down the stairs, feeling my being unspooling.’

Issue 122

Mohsin Hamid

‘She does not stare at you, but when your eyes meet, she does not look away.’

Taiye Selasi

‘I am the full-time driver here. I am not going to kill my employers. I have read that drivers do that now.’

Jim Ruland

‘When one of the fishermen starts belting out ‘All My Rowdy Friends Are Coming Out Tonight’, it feels like a prophecy come to life.’

Eleanor Catton & Anne Meadows

Anne Meadows talks to Eleanor Catton about opium and gold, whether a good author can also be a sadist and what it means to be a New Zealand writer today.