The Commission
Commission for a short story, 300 – 400 words, an interior monologue, from the point of view of Ivanka Trump, as she attends a meeting with her ... Read more
‘… all unwilled by me, uncalled for, involuntarily, suddenly there broke forth my peculiar inheritance – these wings of mine! Still adolescent, as yet … and moist, sticky, like freshly unfurled foliage on an April tree. But, all the same, wings.’
Th... Read more
Here Comes Trouble charts the collapse of a fictitious country, as witnessed by a seventeen-year-old boy, Ellis. In this excerpt, set during the celebrations of... Read more
It had been five years since I went into the costume shop. It was only a few blocks away from my mother’s house, but I always hurried my pace when I walked past... Read more
Martha Sprackland in the best second-hand bookshop in town
‘When I saw the sea after many months it was such a meeting’
A while ago I took my boyfriend up north, to spend a weekend in the seaside town I grew up in. We walked up the pier in the blistering icy wind, walked through the Hall of Mirrors, clamber... Read more
Mohsin Hamid on Exit West, migration, empathy and a certain fantastic fox
Five Dials reached Mohsin Hamid via Skype in his home in Lahore. The connection from British Columbia to Pakistan was not perfect, so after the interview was do... Read more
To find your favourite book, you must translate. By Javier Marías
Rewriting is not only a way of appropriating a text, of adopting and endorsing it, it’s also the best, most exact, most alert, most certain way of reading it.
The idea of actually killing had never been in my consciousness before, except as grand abstraction, but things changed rapidly in those first days of rubble an... Read more
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