Valerie Miles

'Never underestimate the power of a grandmother to leave her mark on coming generations, or the taste of her cooking to cause an epiphany big enough to give the world a shiver.'

Nadifa Mohamed

‘It was in one of those listless summers after graduation that I found myself in the small Japanese town of Sasayama.’

Katherine Faw Morris

‘A lot of babies were born in skiffs during storms, their umbilical cords cut with rusty pocketknives.’

Melinda Moustakis

‘We all would like to think that with one line, one brush, we could make a reader fall madly in love, and there are writers that elicit such a response with the appropriately gorgeous.’

Adam Nicolson

‘It is the wildest part of the American South-West and, in a way, its most beautiful.’

Issue 127

Ruth Ozeki

‘old poems, like polished stones, / tumbled words to break my teeth on.’

Cynthia Ozick

‘Some stories begin with an incident, or a set of enigmatic circumstances, or a scene indelibly witnessed, or the relationship of unlike temperaments, or even something as gossamer as a mood. And then there is the kind of story that is rooted in an idea.’

Andre Perry

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

Sigrid Rausing

Sigrid Rausing

Issue 129

Joseph Roth

Issue 128

Jess Row

‘I walk out of the theatre in a daze. I’ve glimpsed something. But a glimpse, as it turns out, is not enough.’

Jim Ruland

‘It took me seven years of marriage to figure out that my wife is a hardcore Pearl Jam fan.’

Issue 126

Norman Rush

‘I nursed a precocious rage at the stratagems society was employing to keep me from seeing naked women.’