In the light being cast from the kitchen
It’s difficult to explain why you wake up at 3:35 in the morning with no apparent cause. Just as you are about to lift the lid off the saucepan in your dreams, you wake up suddenly, as if sensing the weight of someone’s gaze on you, and find yourself wrapped up beneath a blanket. You...
Writing in the #MeToo era
Shocking revelations, a barrage of headlines, rising public outrage, hashtag activism, and… fiction. My novel The Red Word has been launched at the height of the #MeToo movement, and from its first days on the market it’s been praised for being ‘timely’. How does it feel to have written such a timely novel? How has...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Lúcia Bettencourt: The inconstant gardener
Lúcia Bettencourt and I first met in New Haven in the late 1980s and became fast friends. Our shared adventures and collaborations have taken us to far-flung places, from New York and Rio to Bloomington and Cuiabá. Over the years, we’ve kept up conversations about a host of topics; we most often come back to...
First impressions
Novels from Latvia, Uzbekistan and Poland competed for the 2019 EBRD Literature Prize, established by the London-based European Bank for Reconstruction and Development to celebrate the best fiction in translation from the 38 territories where the bank invests, from Morocco to Mongolia, Estonia to Egypt. The judges were journalist and founder-director of the European Literature Network...
Have keyboard will travel
Any Means Necessary is the second book in Jenny Rogneby’s bestselling series of novels featuring rule-bending police detective Leona Lindberg. Keeping one foot on each side of the law, Leona mounts a special operation of colossal proportions that could reap high rewards personally as well as professionally. Here’s a glimpse into Jenny’s globetrotting writing routine....
The crossing
The girls on the top deck brush the hair from their faces. The hazy blue mountain ranges, rising on both sides of the Strait. The places you will never go, the life there. Ilham’s eyes wander over the mountains of the Rif, the country they are leaving behind. Why did they stay so long in...
John Lanchester: Behind the barricades
John Lanchester’s The Wall is a dystopian vision of post-climate-collapse Britain. As the seas have risen, all the world’s beaches and low-lying communities have been submerged, and vast displaced populations are cast adrift on the oceans in a perilous search of safe harbour. In common with other still-habitable territories, Britain’s rocky coast is topped by...
A remarkable woman
As I made the final corrections to the proofs of my debut novel Attend, I was asked by my publisher whether I wanted to include a dedication. Having toyed with some names – a few people in my life I thought might fit the bill, the idea came to me that I should dedicate this...
