I should not be here to tell this story.


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‘It's that simple: there is a day in my past, a day many years ago in Santiago de Chile, when I should have died and did not.’
I should not be here to tell this story.
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‘The slutty ingenuity of vegetables when it comes to desire and reproductive methods is a marvel.’
Rebecca May Johnson negotiates allotment culture.
‘Globalisation is incomplete: money can go anywhere, but laws cannot.’
Oliver Bullough on one of Britain’s most contested outposts: the British Virgin Islands.
‘You discover during your very first lessons that the problem of singing better involves overcoming many other problems you had not ever imagined.’
A new story from Lydia Davis.
‘She began to count; it was easier this way, counting, because she would not have to remember how she felt.’
An excerpt from Ukamaka Olisakwe’s Ogadinma.
‘Like any desert, I learn myself by what’s desired of me—
and I am demoned by those desires.’
From Postcolonial Love Poem by Natalie Diaz.
Ariel Dorfman is an Argentine-Chilean novelist and playwright. His books include Other Septembers, Heading South, Looking North, Many Americas and a novel, Burning City, written with his son Joaquin. His plays include Death and the Maiden, which received its London revival in the autumn of 2011.
More about the author →‘Chile, for all its imperfections and failures, found a way of responding to the terror inflicted on us (yes, us, we Chileans), a path of peace rather than war, a path of understanding rather than retribution.’
‘But it is not only external, physical problems that Chilean culture is facing. By suddenly being forced into the open, artists and intellectuals are now coming up against an internal dilemma.’
‘Unlike the other comic strips in the magazine, ‘The Adventures of Mampato’ was conceived, illustrated, and entirely produced in Chile.’
‘Very often, family memories from Soviet citizens who lived through the first half of the twentieth century are limited to a couple of letters, and perhaps one or two photographs or documents, hidden in a biscuit tin or tucked away in an old briefcase up in the attic.’
‘Miss C (who is fairly young and pretty) can’t go off by herself with a solitary man, however respectable, to live on the Siberian tundra.’
‘Several times I’ve wanted to title something one thing, but have realized or been persuaded it isn’t a good idea.’
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