"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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New happiness

New happiness

There is a Latvian goddess of happiness, Laima. It was most probably she who instilled the Latvian language with its rhythmical lilt, its roguish plosives and stops, the stark, spare melodiousness of its musicality. It was most probably she who lured generations of Latvians, both ancient and modern, to their native forests and fields –...
Petra Hůlová: Gender agendas

Petra Hůlová: Gender agendas

Multiple award-winning Czech novelist and playwright Petra Hůlová’s Three Plastic Rooms takes the form of a foul-mouthed monologue by an unnamed prostitute in city very like Prague, who holds forth on matters regarding her profession, her punters and society at large. It is her second novel to be translated into English, the original Czech edition...
Crackland

Crackland

The São Paulo of my novels Gringa and Paradise City has a lot in common with contemporary London. There is gentrification and social cleansing; there is a political elite deaf to the plight of the disenfranchised; there is the tragic collapse of a social housing project; there are acid attacks; there is the dichotomy of...
Through the valley of shades

Through the valley of shades

In the Dark Room, originally published in 2005, is a meditation on mourning and an excavation of memory. It was also Brian Dillon’s first book, and we might see it as the prelude to his subsequent essays on photography and hypochondria, artists and ruins, essayists and what he calls ‘essayism’. How, Dillon asks, does memory...
The end of the world that never came

The end of the world that never came

Some books speak infallibly and for eternity; no matter their narrative temporality, the very magnitude of their resonance transcends their present, encompasses the past, often pre-empts and preconditions the future on a universal scale that gives them a sense of almost divine omniscience and awesomeness. These will eventually become what we call rather inadequately the...
Outside in

Outside in

My author bio used to say that I was a graduate of Stanford Law School, a former clerk for the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, and a professor of law at the Maurice A. Deane Law School at Hofstra University. While this is all true, I’ve changed it now to focus on my life as...
Who's there?

Who’s there?

In an instant, I became the woman they assumed I’d been all along: the wife who lied to protect her husband. I almost didn’t hear the knock on the front door. I had removed the brass knocker twelve days earlier, as if that would stop another reporter from showing up unannounced. Once I realized the...
Blossoming on

Blossoming on

Originally published in 1968, My Sweet Orange Tree is a Brazilian classic and one of the country’s bestselling novels of all time, adopted by schools and adapted for cinema, television and the stage. It has also been translated into nineteen languages and continues to be very popular in countries all over the world today. It...
Magic in the mists

Magic in the mists

Land of Smoke is the first English translation, by Jessica Sequeira, of a work by my mother, the recently rediscovered Argentinian writer Sara Gallardo. A story collection originally published in 1977, it is a haunting cornucopia of the strangest fare Southern South America can possibly offer: Andean Sasquatches breeding hybrids with Basque deserters, a stubborn...
A secret

A secret

There was a young lady who had a spare head. She lived in Comodoro Rivadavia. Maybe because of the constant wind, or the monotony of limited society, she began to long for variety. The first step, as we said, was a replacement head. Since she had Armenian features, she chose blonde. Every fondness either grows...
When time disappeared

When time disappeared

A resolute, yet equable slim volume, full of old-world poise, brimming with humanity, added itself in September 1945 to the list of J.-H. Jeheber Librairie et Éditions in Geneva. The title of Françoise Frenkel’s No Place to Lay One’s Head would appear to be affably in tune with its publisher’s ethos and history: the allusion...
The life of art

The life of art

My friend and I went walking the dog in the cemetery. It was a Melbourne autumn: mild breezes, soft air, gentle sun. The dog trotted in front of us between the graves. I had a pair of scissors in my pocket in case we came across a rose bush on a forgotten tomb. “I don’t...