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A Bizarre Courtship
Ben Okri
‘One morning, more golden than yellow, I went outside to our housefront and saw that the beggars had gone.‘
A Bosnian Alphabet
Lawrence Norfolk
‘APOLOGY: A should be for Alphabet: the device I am resorting to in some desperation to structure my thoughts on this subject: my relations vis-à-vis two Yugoslavian wars.‘
A Childhood in Broadmoor Hospital
Patrick McGrath
‘These were the friends of my early boyhood, men who twenty years earlier would still have been called ‘criminal lunatics’.‘
A Cock Fight
Charles Nicholl
‘And now, the night before the fight, with the moon high and nearing the full, came the final preparation: we were taking him to Auguste.’
A Dose of Winter Medicine
Kseniya Melnik
‘I looked at the carpet in her small living room. This is where she had fallen and lay for twenty-four hours before her younger sister, Auntie Tanya, had found her.’
A Fish Out of Water
Mario Vargas Llosa
‘A democracy, I said, is driven by the electoral process, and in elections there are victories and defeats.’
A Kidnapped West or Culture Bows Out
Milan Kundera
‘But since Europe itself is in the process of losing its own cultural identity, it perceives in Central Europe nothing but a political regime; put another way, it sees in Central Europe only Eastern Europe.’
A Language of Figs
Sema Kaygusuz
Sema Kaygusuz on the inheritances of genocide and historical memory, and what her own grandmother, a survivor of the Dersim Massacre in Turkey, taught her about life and language.