‘I see in an instant what has brought people to the valley for four centuries.’
If you wish to visit the valley of Kashmir without being turned back, shot or kidnapped, there are two approaches. The first is by air from New Delhi, where the valley looks orderly and comprehensible in the Himalayan sunshine: a small place of lakes and rivers, orchards, patchwork fields and tin ro…
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‘I think there should be a National Service of Hospitality. The best way to see the true face of humanity is to serve it a plate of chips.’
Camilla Grudova on bad-mannered customers.
‘Anyone who has ever worked night shifts will understand the vertiginous feeling that comes with staring down the day from the wrong end.’
A.K. Blakemore on working nights.
‘I was constantly reading job ads, trying to find my holy grail – a job I could stand to do, and someone foolish enough to hire me.’
Sandra Newman on learning how to play professional blackjack.
‘I loved being a receptionist. What I loved about it was playing the part of being a receptionist.’
Emily Berry on being a temporary office worker.
‘Every part of you would swell, including your eyeballs, and no matter how much water you drank, you were always dehydrated.’
Junot Díaz on working for a steel mill.
‘In the imagination of strangers there is a small town in America which represents not just itself but the whole country‘.
‘As many as thirty-five states in the world are thought to have the capacity (if not the wish) to build a nuclear weapon.’
‘My first sight of modern Iraq was a colossal fairy-lit head of Saddam Hussein hurtling out of the darkness, as if from another galaxy of despotism and violence.’
’In my inferno of solitude, I thought there must be some reason why I was doing what I was doing.‘
‘Ask anyone in Ayodhya, and they will say the city’s Hindu–Muslim harmony can withstand any test.’
Snigdha Poonam on the construction of a Hindu temple on the ruins of a mosque in Utter Pradesh.
Winner of the Commonwealth Writers Short Story Prize for the region of the Caribbean
