Happy_Marriage_thumbnail

CONTEXT
Ann Patchett: This dog’s life

“I want to learn to love people the way I love my dog, with pride and enthusiasm and a complete amnesia for faults… to love others the way my dog loves me.”

 

Engagements_featureINTERVIEW
J. Courtney Sullivan forever

“All good writers experience a lot of doubt, all the time. What separates a successful writer from the pack is the willingness to live with that doubt and keep going.” 

 

Symphony_of_Work_thumbnailSHORT STORY
Molly Antopol: The old world

Sveta had come home with a Ukrainian guidebook. ‘You can imagine more perfect honeymoon?’ ‘Terrific!’ I had said, though I’d been hoping for Tahiti.”

 

Christos_Tsiolkas_featureINTERVIEW
Christos Tsiolkas: Privilege and shame

“When you experience true shame you become truly adult, you can make moral judgements but you can no longer be smug about the world.”

 

Talking_to_Ourselves_featureEXTRACT
Andrés Neuman: In living memory

When someone you slept with dies, you begin to doubt their body and yours. The once touched body withdraws, your own body loses substance, your muscles fill with vapour.”

 

Farmageddon_thumbnailCONTEXT
Philip Lymbery with Isabel Oakeshott: A little bird…

Across China, millions of birds lay dead. Too late, the regime realised that the sparrows were not pests, pilfering the harvest, but vital to the food chain.”

 

Deborah_Levy_feature_2INTERVIEW
Deborah Levy finds her voice

The things I don’t want to know are usually the things I end up writing about. These are the things we know but don’t want to know we know.”

 

No_Regrets_featureEXTRACT
John Dufresne: No way to live like this

“A fiftyish reporter with preposterously red hair handed me her business card: Perdita Curry, True-Crime Novels. Could it be? I thought. Factual and made-up at the same time?”

 

Plus…

(c) Paintings Collection; Supplied by The Public Catalogue FoundationHardy_Time-TornManhattan_feature

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

More stories of love, yearning and despair in Elisabeth Russell Taylor’s ‘The Meaning’, Lúcia Bettencourt’s ‘Circus Eroticus’ and Ricardo Waale’s ‘Platform Two’; a round-up of books about mental health by Daniel Lipscombe, interviews with Barbara Taylor and Zoe Pilger, who deal with these issues in fiction and memoir, and an essay on dementia and imagination by Fiona McFarlane; writers’ tips from Gideon Lewis-Kraus and Louise Levene; Bruce Holsinger evokes Chaucer’s London; a glimpse inside the writing spaces of Elisabeth Russell Taylor and Audrey Magee; Molly Antopol on the wisdom of Grace Paley; Louise Walters admires A.S. Byatt’s ‘The July Ghost’; haunting fiction from new voice Max Dunbar; an epic journey to the New World in LJ Bollée and Philippe Nicloux’s graphic novel Terra Australis; Christopher Nicholson’s Thomas Hardy top ten; inside the minds of Napoleon and the French with François-René de Chateaubriand, and another voice from beyond in Derek Jarman’s ‘Manhattan’.