Issue 119

Robin Robertson

Andre Perry

‘I was stuck in Texas for a month. The days passed like slow-motion films.

Issue 64

Andrei Platonov

‘Grass had grown back on the trodden-down dirt tracks of the civil war, because the war had stopped.’

Roy Robins

‘This conflation of hard-nosed realism and bright-eyed idealism has confused the aims of the award.’

Issue 90

Richard Powers

‘Think of mitosis as trillions of slightly near-sighted, plagiarizing students’

Anita Sethi

‘At four o’clock in the morning, when Louis de Bernières has lines of poetry repeating in his head which won’t stop gnawing away, he writes them down.‘

Issue 8

Elizabeth Tallent

‘The harmonica player is left standing alone in the light, talking to himself. He cleans the spit from his instrument with a white handkerchief so old it is nearly transparent.’

Issue 91

Frederic Tuten

‘Those words made me wonder why I ever wanted to be an artist, why I ever wanted to live, though I never thought I wanted to die.’

Sigrid Rausing

Issue 21

Patrick Süskind

‘Early one August evening, when most people had already left the park, two men sat confronting one another across a chessboard.’

Eliza Robertson

‘Land of the misty giants: cedar, alder, Ponderosa pine. Cascade Mountains pushing out green like grass through a garlic press.’

George Rosie

‘I’ve seen many images from the Lockerbie calamity since but none has stayed with me like the picture of Shannon’s pretty, smiling face.’

Katha Pollitt

‘Nobody wanted to hear / about the rain or its father / or leviathan slicing the deeps / at the black edge of the world / under the cold blue light of the Pleiades.’

Issue 58

Nell Stroud

‘When I was ten we moved to the country, to a village called Minety.’