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Self-Consciousness: Memoirs by John Updike
Edmund White
‘The freedom conferred by masks. Children and current wives cannot blame you for what your characters do and say.’
Notes from New York
James Wolcott
‘Now and then it can appear that an entire magazine is opening up the silks, searching for a soft place to land.’
Stevenage
Gary Younge
‘In 1988 my mother took the bus to Stevenage town centre to do the weekly shop, came home and died in her sleep.’
Wrestling with Translation
Jeffrey Yang
‘As I embarked on my adventure I immediately started to feel that old hatred for simplified Chinese characters.’
The Aesthetics of Resistance
Peter Weiss
‘His whole life, he had declared while still at work on this painting, was nothing less than a continual struggle against the backwardness of thought and the killing of art.’
In Gikuyu, for Gikuyu, of Gikuyu
Binyavanga Wainaina
‘My first name, Binyavanga, has always been a sort of barometer of public mood.’
Saigon Dreaming
Tela Zasloff
‘In the summer of 1964, when we arrived in Saigon, our house belonged to the United States military, whose cheerful Vietnamese employees moved us in.’
Jihad Redux
Declan Walsh
‘American patience snapped, and Washington took matters into its own hands.’
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.’
Getting The Words Out
John Updike
‘No, it is not confrontation but some wish to avoid it, some hasty wish to please, that betrays my flow of speech.’
Introducing Daniel Galera
Alejandro Zambra
‘It’s hard to introduce Daniel Galera’s tale without resorting to adjectives that are more likely to arouse distrust than interest.’
Cricket in Samoa
Gavin Young
‘Balls flew towards the beach or into dense jungle. Enthusiastic young fielders tumbled head over heels in the morning glories. Village elders, large, heavy-breasted, critical men, lay in the shade on cushions discussing the course of play like contented sea lions on their favourite rocks.’
