‘We showed 'the spirit of London', the same spirit of our citizen forebears during their bombing by the Luftwaff.’
Generalizations about the national psyche — supposing there is one — must always be treated with suspicion. In 1997, the great crowds who mourned the death of the Princess of Wales with their tears, flowers and candles were taken as evidence that British behaviour had utterly changed. We were at…
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Alison Smith on the week she spent with Ursula K. Le Guin.
This surreal tale from Haruki Murakami circles a Charlie Parker album that never existed. Translated from the Japanese by Philip Gabriel.
A monastic community persists after a ‘great chaos and collapse’ in this story by the 2018 Nobel Prize for Literature laureate, Olga Tokarczuk. Translated from the Polish by Jennifer Croft
Two poems from Rebecca Tamás’ collection WITCH.
Summer Brennan on high heels, foot-binding, and our ongoing performances of gender.
‘Feelings of hate and despair dwindle as they pass down the generations.’
‘Always and everywhere, this unequal struggle to preserve and remember.’
‘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.’
Erica Chung’s translation of ‘Seven People with the Same Name and their Discrete Moments’ by Han Yujoo is the winner of Harvill Secker’s Young Translators’ Prize 2017.
