Tilly and I stood on the corner together, kicking our feet and sending sprays of white into the air. “Has your dad gone to work?” she said. “No.” I did an especially big kick. “He’s gone to get provisions.” Tilly stopped kicking. “What are provisions?” “It’s what people call food when it snows,” I said....
“Up to the age of thirty-one,” wrote Chester Himes, reflecting on the time that he was writing If He Hollers Let Him Go, “I had been hurt emotionally, spiritually, and physically as much as thirty-one years can bear: I had lived in the South, I had fallen down an elevator shaft, I had been kicked...
It was just turning dark when I pulled to the curb in front of the hotel. Alice clutched my arm and whispered, “Oh, no, Bob, no! I don’t feel like being refused. I’m not in the mood for it.” “What the hell!” I said, startled. Some other girl, but not Alice; she was always going...
The dogs are scratching at the kitchen door. How long, Lydia thinks, has she been lost in the thought of her rival dead? She passes her hand over her eyes, an unconscious effort to push the hot red edge off everything she sees, and goes to the door to let them in. When Ivan confessed...
Our bodies are piled on top of each other in the shape of a cross. The body of a man I don’t know has been thrown across my stomach at a ninety-degree angle, face up, and on top of him a boy, older than me, tall enough that the crook of his knees press down...
France and the world were stunned by shock and horror at the beginning and end of 2015 when terrorist fundamentalists spread fear and murder across Paris. Hunting down the culprits, locating their networks and above all untangling and striving to understand their motives and ultimate purpose has become a daily agenda, with ramifications far beyond...
When my wife and I married fourteen years ago, our two bookcases became one. It was a lopsided union. Roxanne had cultivated her book collection for years, saving everything she read, all the way back to a desiccated hardcover anthology of Czech short stories she’d liberated from her public library in high school. I, on...
Years ago, when I was starting out as a writer, I met a literary agent. “What do you want to see happen to characters in a story?” I asked him. His reply was simple: “I want to see them changed.” In many ways, identity change is a central part of most stories. Through the experiences...
There are good reasons why an imagined world of spies and spycraft has provided an alluring backdrop for British fiction and, subsequently, British cinema and television for more than a hundred years. It is a land that is regularly visited, with a long list of explorers, from Kipling, at the very beginning of the twentieth...
Still pondering gifts for the smaller people in your life as the winter holidays loom? Here’s a selection of non-perishable treats for Discerning Young, Not Very Young and Definitely Older readers, featuring books that have been published, reissued or rediscovered in 2015, as well as one or two earlier favourites. Hamper #1 – A Box of...
On 10 December 2015, Hong Kong-born British poet Sarah Howe was awarded the revived Sunday Times/Peters, Fraser & Dunlop Young Writer of the Year award for her remarkable debut collection Loop of Jade. Also shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and in the running for the T.S. Eliot Prize to be announced...
They say that good things come in small packages, and W11 Opera’s current production of Eliza and the Swans, a sparkling retelling of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Wild Swans, is certainly a glorious thing on the small stage of the POSK Theatre in Hammersmith, which for two nights transforms into the great world of fairy...
