"As writers we have a responsibility, sometimes, to make the future seem real.” John Ironmonger
Welcome to the Green Zone

Welcome to the Green Zone

IT’S NOT LIKE I WAS EXPECTING STALINGRAD, but Baghdad took the piss. Arriving for the first time, tucked into a UN car, I watched as the city lights refracted through the bulletproof glass. Floodlights hovered over a pickup football game, square lamps uplit the National Museum, fairy lights dripped down...
She-devils and evil monsters

She-devils and evil monsters

IT IS TEMPTING, WHEN READING cases of historical murder, to find comfort in the knowledge that there lies a distance of hundreds of years between us and those dreadful events. We may look upon the laws and attitudes of the early moderns as relics of a bygone age, and perhaps...
Under the circumstances

Under the circumstances

SWEET AIR, DIVINE LIGHT! How long have we waited for this happy sight? This ancient city, its sun-baked streets, the Acropolis in the distance, raging with light. We are here, so it begins. The first night. Everybody orders wine. It comes in little jugs called carafes. Red or white, it...
The causes of a life: Mary Shelley in Bath

The causes of a life: Mary Shelley in Bath

STRICTLY SPEAKING, OF COURSE, it wasn’t Mary Shelley who arrived in Bath on 10 September 1816, but Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin. The nineteen-year-old who alighted in the city that Tuesday afternoon wasn’t yet the wife of Percy Bysshe Shelley, the up-and-coming poet and heir to a baronetcy. Instead, she was his...
Climate change: truth and fiction

Climate change: truth and fiction

DAVID BOWIE HAD A remarkable talent for writing songs that could conjure up a story. It is impossible to listen to ‘Space Oddity’ without imagining Major Tom sitting in a tin can, drifting forever into space. But the Bowie song that stays with me most is ‘Five Years’. It tells...
Friends and traitors

Friends and traitors

IMAGINE A GROUP OF BEST FRIENDS from university, now in their early forties, reuniting for a weekend to celebrate their enduring friendship. But this isn’t just any reunion – they’re about to open predictions they made about each other twenty years ago. This is the intriguing premise of Holly Watt’s...
Dark, ingenious and daring: Pretty Ugly by Kirsty Gunn

Dark, ingenious and daring: Pretty Ugly by Kirsty Gunn

THE WAY PEOPLE TALK ABOUT short stories often inclines to silversmithing analogies: burnished, finely wrought, beautifully crafted. That, or Fabergé eggs. And we say short story collection rather than group. Collection suggests careful selection from an array of available possibilities, white daisies on a vast lawn. In the afterword of...
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Confessions

Confessions

David Means is the author of the highly acclaimed story collections A Quick Kiss of Redemption (1991), Assorted Fire Events (2000) The Secret Goldfish (2004) and Spot (2010) as well as the Man Booker-nominated novel Hystopia (2016). His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Zeotrope and Best American Short Stories. He lives in...
Life on the edge

Life on the edge

Rodrigo Fuentes’ Trout, Belly Up is an extraordinary collection of tales that weave together to create a dark picture of contemporary rural Guatemala. The stories coalesce around Don Henrik, a kind but unlucky landowner of Scandinavian descent, whose abortive agricultural projects include trout, cardamom and melon farming. We hear from family members and employees how his attempts...
The cow who wanted to be a dog

The cow who wanted to be a dog

It was the sugarcane harvest and the fields were burning. You could see flames all the way from here to the mountains. Ash floated around all day, sticking to your skin, your moustache, your eyelashes. We were all black with it. On the fifth day it rained. It doesn’t rain in December, but that year...
A paean to the death of Central Europe

A paean to the death of Central Europe

Józef Wittlin, like Homer’s Odysseus whom he so much admired, was a man of many minds, human experiences, geographical and national homes. Born in Galicia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, he would come to be hailed as one of the most important voices of a new-born independent Poland. A Jew by birth, a Christian...
Fatima Bhutto: Lost hearts and souls

Fatima Bhutto: Lost hearts and souls

Fatima Bhutto’s second novel The Runaways is a provocative, astute and ever-timely exploration of what makes three young people in Pakistan and England reject the society that raised them and sign up to the war against the West. Anita, growing up in a sprawling Karachi slum, aims to better herself with book learning but finds...
A fetching destination

A fetching destination

It’s not every day I find myself eyeing up pornographic imagery with a Chinese man and a veiled-up African Muslim woman. The three of us were gathered around a counter and inspecting some aphrodisiac pills, the packaging of which displayed a photo of a man (with what I pray was a prosthetic penis) in session...
Ece Temelkuran: Disrupt the disrupters

Ece Temelkuran: Disrupt the disrupters

 Desperate, confused, bored and exhausted. These are all words that most of us could relate to when we think of modern-day politics. Have we lost the plot? According to Ece Temelkuran, a prominent critical political commentator, we most certainly have but we are not alone. In her ominously titled book How to Lose a...
Sheena Kamal: The rage that simmers

Sheena Kamal: The rage that simmers

It All Falls Down is the second in what will hopefully turn out to be a long-running series of crime novels by Canadian author Sheena Kamal. Once again focused on an enigmatic female protagonist named Nora Watts, it is a worthy follow up to Kamal’s critically acclaimed debut Eyes Like Mine. I may be a...
All in the mind

All in the mind

At the risk of sounding like valedictorian delivering a graduation speech, a ‘psychological thriller’ is defined on Wikipedia as a thriller “which emphasizes the unstable or delusional psychological states of its characters.” As definitions go, that’s good enough for me. In general, I just know a psychological thriller when I read one. Most whodunits, at...
Visions and monsters

Visions and monsters

The Monstrous Child, which has just completed a very successful run at the Royal Opera House’s Linbury Theatre, is one of the first and most audacious examples of a new genre: highly evocative classical opera especially written for teenage audiences. Adapted from the YA novel of the same name by Francesca Simon with music by...
First date

First date

I met Finn outside the BFI. It was my idea to go there; if he turned out to be incredibly unattractive or boring, at least I’d have seen one more Derek Jarman film, which would give me something to talk to my dad about. I stood at the entrance, eavesdropping on a conversation between two...
Fantasies

Fantasies

Her costume would be stunning, covered in sequins and feathers. She’d chosen the most spectacular one on the samba school website, not worrying about cost. Headdress, heels, rhinestones, feathers, and glitter galore – all eyes would be on her as she showed off the steps she’d learned at the dance studio in preparation for the...