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 ... 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 done, transcribed and edited, Mohsin looked over the text again. Because of all the sections... 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 and mayhem; there came a point, in the state of heightened alertness that simply being alive... Read more
Art Spiegelman is often credited as the father of the graphic novel. Famously, his two-volume Holocaust comic Maus, in which Jews are drawn as mice an... Read more
Niña Weijers on why writing is such a curious business.
If you really want to encourage people to read literature, you’re better off adding a certain mystique. Because the secret the writer is faced with, the secret of language and of reality, is shared by the reader.
Round and round they go. A short story by Thijs de Boer
I’ve heard people say that in your dreams you can never have any control over the light. And that if you want to know for sure whether or not you’re dreaming, you have to try turning the light off or on.
By Maartje Wortel. Translated from the Dutch by Michele Hutchison
When you move house, you move the stuff with you. Beneath a few notebooks and rubber bands, there’s a letter from a former lover. You no longer see each other.
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