‘James Cameron's film had not yet appeared, but a great human tragedy was unfolding on our living-room carpet.‘
My son was three and my daughter five. It was the summer of 1997. James Cameron’s film had not yet appeared, but a great human tragedy was unfolding on our living-room carpet.
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Doctors, solitude and the stones within us – for fiction about isolation, it has to be Haruki Murakami. Translated from the Japanese by Jay Rubin.
‘Things have changed without seeking permission.’ A plague diary of this March, by Gonçalo M. Tavares, translated from the Portuguese by Daniel Hahn.
‘Our view of the morning’s entertainment was restricted by the width of the door frame.’ Bruce Chatwin writes about his imprisonment during a coup in Benin.
‘A leech bodes this: you will, sooner or later, overflow yourself. ’ Rebecca Giggs on leeches and the borders of the human body.
‘Her eyes fluttered open and I felt like I was at the edge of the mouth of a cave, with every intention of jumping in.’ For pure escapism, lose yourself in the nineteenth-century Paris of Carmen Maria Machado.
‘Could grief for one woman have caused all this? We were told so.’
‘Travel writing of most kinds, not just the humorous, has the history of colonialism perched on its shoulder.’
Ian Jack introduces Granta 97: Best of Young American Novelists 2.
Lindsey Hilsum shows how investigative reporting has become just as dangerous as frontline correspondence. ‘Investigative reporters are in more peril than ever and the front line has come to Europe.’
