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Best Book of 2008: The Alphabet
Rae Armantrout
Rae Armantrout on why Ron Silliman's The Alphabet is the best book of 2008.
Julia Armfield | First Sentence
Julia Armfield
‘A first line is a threat, I think.’ Julia Armfield on the first sentence of her story ‘Longshore Drift’.
Best Book of 1963: The Group
Julia Armfield
‘Cigarettes, lorgnons, eggs benedict, cocktails mixed with maple syrup, long spills down Lanvin suits.’ Julia Armfield on why Mary McCarthy’s The Group is the best book of 1963.
Northern Soul
Simon Armitage
‘I live on the border, between two states. I've lived here all my life, just about, and I know this place like the back of my hand’.
The Cloud Factory
Graeme Armstrong
‘There’s this paradoxical nostalgia where even though yi suffered, yi miss it.’
Memoir by Graeme Armstrong.
On Rihanna
Alexia Arthurs
‘Rihanna had cut her hair short, and she was no longer being marketed as the Caribbean Beyoncé.’
The Borderlands
Neal Ascherson
‘Here is the forest. Not just a forest, but a puszcza: a Polish word that means a world of trees which have never been felled since the first bands of human beings arrived to hunt here.’
Beirut | Dispatches
Lana Asfour
‘I was determined that this latest crisis wouldn’t keep me out of the country of my birth.’
A Feudal Outpost in Mount Lebanon
Lana Asfour
‘Intelligent, unpredictable, occasionally ruthless, Jumblatt shows that he is still very much in the game.’
Notes from East Germany
Timothy Garton Ash
‘Like previous re-settlers, the East Germans now living in the West produced works in what I call the ‘Owl of Minerva’ school of literature. As the Owl of Minerva flies at dusk, so they, in flight from the system, made their reckoning with it.’
Warsaw Notebook
Timothy Garton Ash
‘Underground groups are called ‘structures’. Some people offer friends the service of their ‘structures’. This makes them important. Then it turns out the structures don't exist.’