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How to Write About Africa
Binyavanga Wainaina
‘Always end your book with Nelson Mandela saying something about rainbows or renaissances. Because you care.’
Agnes of Iowa
Lorrie Moore
‘Through college she had been a feminist – more or less. She shaved her legs, but just not often enough, she liked to say.’
Dreams for Hire
Gabriel García Márquez
‘The wave had erupted with such force that it obliterated the glass lobby.‘ Translated from the Spanish by Nick Caistor.
Those Who Felt Differently
Ian Jack
‘Could grief for one woman have caused all this? We were told so.’
Menudo
Raymond Carver
‘Vicky says I’m crazy. She said worse things too last night. But who could blame her?’
The Imam and the Indian
Amitav Ghosh
‘We were both travelling, he and I: we were travelling in the West. The only difference was that I had actually been there, in person.’
The Fall of Saigon
James Fenton
‘I wanted to see a communist victory, which I presumed to be inevitable. I wanted to see the fall of a city.’
The Snow in Ghana
Ryszard Kapuściński
‘We always carry it to foreign countries, all over the world, our pride and our powerlessness.’ Translated from the Polish by William Brand.
Glitches
John Gregory Dunne
‘I prefer not to speculate about what might have happened if I had not taken the ECG.’
Lost Cat
Mary Gaitskill
‘Which deaths are tragic and which are not? Who decides what is big and what is little?’
Where is Kigali?
Lindsey Hilsum
‘Evariste was the nightwatchman. He and I were alone in the house in Kigali, the capital of Rwanda, when the killing started.’
Kiltykins
Ved Mehta
‘When I was seeing Kilty (how, even today, the word 'seeing' mesmerizes me), the fact of my blindness was never mentioned, referred to, or alluded to’.
Editing Vidia
Diana Athill
‘I thought so highly of Vidia’s writing and felt his presence on our list to be so important that I simply could not allow myself not to like him.’
Tadpoles
Primo Levi
‘It was a harsh and brutal puberty: the tiny creatures began to fret, as if an inner sense had forewarned them of the torment in store’
The View from this End
Alexandra Fuller
‘It lay like a sodden comma, curled up against its mother, and no one realised it was dead.’
The Zoo in Basel
John Berger
‘To create is to let take over something which did not exist before and is therefore new.’
Evensong
Todd McEwen
‘Characteristically my wife refused to be drawn into the situation while I became obsessed with it.’
Always the Same Snow and Always the Same Uncle
Herta Müller
‘Who knows: what I write I must eat, what I don’t write – eats me.’
Self-Consciousness
Edward W. Said
‘It was through my mother that I grew more aware of my body as incredibly fraught and problematic.‘
His Roth
Philip Roth
‘I naively believed as a child that I would always have a father present, and the truth seems to be that I always will.’
The Summer After the War
Kazuo Ishiguro
‘As it was, my grandfather began helping me to paint without my having to ask him.’
At Yankee Stadium
Don DeLillo
‘From a series of linked couples they become one continuous wave, larger all the time.’
