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‘The issue was the first of its kind. Trust me, it said. I know what I am talking about. These young writers are the future of literature. Watch. History will prove me right.’ – Bill Buford, Granta editor (1979-95)
‘Cover your nose and mouth, the order came, swift and useless; if they’d had their turbans they would have wound them around their faces but there were only the balaclavas.’
Fiction by Kamila Shamsie from the 2013 Best of Young British Novelists issue.
‘She felt exhausted, emptied out; she thought of the day that had passed – it was astonishing to her, that a single set of hours could contain so many separate states of violent feeling.’
Fiction by Sarah Waters from the 2003 Best of Young British Novelists issue.
‘This is the one thing I know from the minute I lift the receiver and slip that voice inside my ear: it will happen.’
Fiction by A.L. Kennedy from the 1993 Best of Young British Novelists issue.
‘As it was, my grandfather began helping me to paint without my having to ask him.’
Fiction by Kazuo Ishiguro from the 1983 Best of Young British Novelists issue.
Mary Ruefle is the author of Trances of the Blast and Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism, and Selected Poems, winner of the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. She has published ten books of poetry, a book of prose and a comic book, and is the recipient of numerous honors, including an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and a Whiting Award. She lives in Bennington, Vermont. Her latest book is My Private Property.
More about the author →‘Life continually circled in cold inaccessible serenity around unhappy Earth’
‘Red sadness never appears sad . . . it appears in flashes of passion, anger, fear, inspiration and courage, in dark unsellable visions; it is an upside down penny concealed beneath a tea cosy.’
‘Refusal is the last recourse of the powerless.’
Marina Benjamin on her years of not eating, and not growing.
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