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The Last Eighteen Drops
Vitali Vitaliev
‘Drinking vodka is just a memory for me now. Vodka was hurting me.’
Bush House
Mirza Waheed
‘I first stepped into Bush House on a dreary November day in 2001. It was a trepid walk.’
My First European
Edmund White
‘I belong to the last generation of Americans obsessed with Europe and intimidated by it.’
In the Shadow of the Hospital
Tim Winton
‘All that yearning spilling down amid the treetops and roof ridges, a shadow I’d never properly considered before.’
Ali the Muscle
Johnny West
‘All individuality is collapsed by the dog-eat-dog language of ‘us and them’ into a choice between one of two separate, irreconcilable identities.’
Diego Garcia
Simon Winchester
‘How do you persuade a thousand dogs to walk into a fire? How do you persuade them, as it were, to commit suttee?’
The Metaphoreign Body
Tod Wodicka
‘Finally, I was reduced to a piece of matter, solid and real and mute and totally absorbed inside a foreign system.’
Italo Calvino
John Updike
‘Post-modernism, if it can be said to exist at all, had in Calvino its most seductive showman.’
A question of identity
Dubravka Ugrešić
‘One of the first things a child learns is the sentiment: My country is… And so begins the homeland briefing that lasts from the cradle to the grave.’
The Coral Reef
Tran Vu
'"So, our last night of socialism," Dzung said as he squatted down beside me. I pulled two cigarettes out of my pocket and handed one to him, but didn't reply.'
A Norwegian Nightmare
Alf Kjetil Walgermo
‘Could we somehow have avoided feeding the killer at our own breast?’
