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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.’

Eight Trains

Alberto Olmos

‘To go is always to go somewhere; returning, you return to nowhere. That’s the way it is.’

Returning to the Hague

Georgi Tenev

‘‘Shall I tell you, son,’ I ask him, ‘exactly what I’m guilty of?’’

Filling Up With Sugar

Yuten Sawanishi

‘The vagina was the first part of her mother’s body that turned to sugar.’

Boys in Zinc

Svetlana Alexievich

‘I was trying to present a history of feelings, not the history of the war itself.’

Gothic Night

Mansoura Ez Eldin

‘He wrote: they called it the city of eternal sun. Its sun set only after the last inhabitant slept, and rose before the first got up. They were all deprived of the night. They were not even aware of its existence.’

From Site

Daisuke Yokota

‘The photograph we are left with and the memory of that time do not progress along the same time axes.’

Milan Kundera | Interview

Milan Kundera & Ian McEwan

‘If you are a small nation, though, you do not make history. You are always the object of history.’ Ian McEwan interviews Milan Kundera in 1984.

Preserves for Life

Olga Tokarczuk

‘He came upon one under the kitchen sink labelled ‘Shoestrings in vinegar, 2004’, and that should have alarmed him.’

Flying Towards a Country of Rain

Wang Yin

‘Paper phantoms sit beside me / watching a two-hour movie.’

The Mother of All Sins

Hanan al-Shaykh

‘Loving life is the mother of all sins.’

German Quasi-Story of Ulrika Thöus

Salvador Espriu

‘For hidden though they may be – and it is incontrovertible that they are – sooner or later the testicles will have to appear.’

Animals

Michel Laub

‘I only stopped playing with him when he began biting the fingers of anyone who tried to pet him.’

From the Past Comes the Storms

Andrés Felipe Solano

‘During the hottest months, the thermometer settles in at 100 degrees like a nonagenarian in a rocker – no one can make it move.’