Issue 129

Will Self

Striking the keys of the same typewriter that once sat under J.G. Ballard’s fingers, Will Self reimagines the legendary writer’s last days.

Neil Steinberg

Issue 93

Wendell Steavenson

‘Thayr held out. He would not betray his country, he would not betray his leader.’

Andre Perry

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

Sigrid Rausing

Owen Sheers

‘It’s been said more than once during this US presidential campaign that the rest of the world should be allowed a vote as well.’

Jonathan Raban

‘It began as a vacuum in the atmosphere, far out over the Atlantic. Trying to fill itself, it set up a spinning mass of air, like a plughole sucking water from a bath; but the faster the winds blew, the more the vacuum deepened.’

Issue 49

Jonathan Raban

‘What the bottom line always comes to is the old two a.m. cry: We can’t go on living like this.’

Issue 114

Ann Patchett

‘Once you knew what God wanted from your life, you would have to be ten different kinds of fool to look the other way.’

Issue 58

Nell Stroud

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

Roy Robins

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

Sigrid Rausing

‘Possession takes many forms, and at the heart of it is death and dereliction, invasion and submission.’

Issue 16

Oliver Sacks

‘Deprived of continuity, of a quiet, continuous, inner narrative, he is driven to a sort of narrational frenzy: hence his ceaseless tales, his confabulations, his mythomania.’

Issue 67

Larry Towell

A photoessay on the Mennonite colonies of Mexico and in Canada.