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Lovely Girls, Very Cheap

Decca Aitkenhead

‘A bar girl in Ko Samui is employed to attract customers. Almost every bar has at least one girl, and some of the larger bars have up to twenty’.

The Foreign Correspondent

Pallavi Aiyar

‘The absence of Indian foreign correspondents was, and is, unexceptional.’

Mr Wu

Pallavi Aiyar

‘A middle-aged woman in teddy bear-spangled pajamas came hurtling down on a flatbed tricycle.’ Pallavi Aiyar returns to her old Beijing hutong.

How Prayer Works

Kaveh Akbar

‘My brother and I hurried through sloppy postures of praise, quiet as the light pooling around us.’

A new poem by Kaveh Akbar.

Baghdad Diary

Nuha al-Radi

‘Other countries do wrong: look what Russia did in Afghanistan, or Turkey invading Cyprus, or Israel taking over Palestine and Lebanon. Nobody bombed them senseless. They were not even punished. Perhaps we have too much history.’

Twenty-Eight Days in Baghdad

Nuha al-Radi

‘Rumsfeld says everything is improving day by day. I suggest he come live here for a couple of days and then say that.’

The Mother of All Sins

Hanan al-Shaykh

‘Loving life is the mother of all sins.’

Rabih Alameddine | Portrait of My Father

Rabih Alameddine

‘I come from a family that hangs pictures of family on its walls.’

The Bridge

Daniel Alarcón

‘There was no question we were underwater.’

The Ground Floor

Daniel Alarcón

‘I met Darin Rossi standing in a thick, gooey pool of fake blood, on an early-December night in Los Angeles.’

The Provincials

Daniel Alarcón

‘I'd been out of the Conservatory for about a year when my great-uncle Raúl died.’

Lost in Translation

Daniel Alarcón

‘It’s about the music of it. “It’s Hollywood,” Mario said, and assured me the same is true of political speech-making.’

The Inauguration

Daniel Alarcón

‘With few exceptions, presidents do not comment on or even recognize an individual loss like this one; they operate on another scale, and there is no room within their discourse for something so small.’

The King is Always Above the People

Daniel Alarcón

‘It was the year I left my parents, a few useless friends, and a girl who liked to tell everyone we were married, and moved two hundred kilometres downstream to the capital.’