‘On days when the light is beautiful, when the sun is red above the Saône, I find myself regretting not having come more often when my parents were working the farm.’
Raymond Depardon, the son of a peasant, has become one of France’s most distinguished photojournalists.
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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.
‘Having told his story, the thief had said goodbye to Agnès, regretfully, she thought’.
'Bára went to the church on the advice of her friend Ivana. She had been suffering from occasional bouts of depression', Ivan Klíma in 'Don't Forsake Me' in Granta 59: France: The Outsider.
‘If something is usually done in novels, but I can’t actively justify doing it, then I don’t do it.’
In a plain material sense the condition of being alive is that of living inside this contradiction – being membrane-bound.
‘Through college she had been a feminist – more or less. She shaved her legs, but just not often enough, she liked to say.’
