Issue 66

Claire Messud

‘Those summer evenings were all alike.’

Nelson Mandela

April Ayers Lawson

‘I again told him I wasn’t ready to have sex, and his only response was to lean in and kiss me. The hallway in which we walked seemed to be shrinking, closing in on us.’ – April Ayers Lawson on intimacy after sexual abuse.

Issue 113

Andrés Neuman

‘What can damage us more? The blunt honesty of hatred, or the thwarted objective of reconciliation?’

Issue 54

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.’

Andrés Neuman

‘1.In the waiting area of the Málaga airport for departing flights, a flock of birds nests on the beams. They fly back and forth across the high ceiling.’

Javier Marías

‘We live in an age that tends to depersonalize even people and is, in principle, averse to anthropomorphism.’

Maggie O’Farrell

‘It is part angel, part lepidopteran, part Rorschach inkblot.’

Yiyun Li

‘If you were like me, you would know the obsession of the compulsive reader: every street sign; every bottle label’

Issue 139

Chinelo Okparanta

‘All that thought of home gave the girl a sickly feeling, the longing of something so out of reach, something she wasn’t even sure she could any longer truly remember.’

Togara Muzanenhamo

‘He will not understand her fascination / for rain, these summer months of water / that somehow keep the money coming in.’

Marie-Hélène Lafon

‘He was long and white; his hands especially were long and white, and he sewed; he looked after the linen; he worked as a woman would; he lived in the house; he didn’t speak, he was rarely spoken to.’

Translated from the French by Stephanie Smee.

Vladimir Mayakovsky

‘I’m in no hurry; I’ll not storm your dreams’

Issue 125

Herta Müller

‘Who knows: what I write I must eat, what I don’t write – eats me.’