“If the burden is too much and stays too long, even love bends, cracks, comes close to breaking”
“I am old. That is the first thing to tell you. The thing you are least likely to believe. If you saw me you would probably think I was about forty, but you would be very wrong.”
“So there I lie on the plateau, under me the central core of fire from which was thrust this grumbling grinding mass of plutonic rock”
“Tattooing in prison is like trying to sew fine stitches with a knitting needle. It’s the essence of prison ingenuity – that so much can be done with so little.”
Samin Nosrat introduces her new book Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking. “I have become slightly obsessed… revolutionary in its simplicity” Yotam Ottolenghi
‘McCormack brilliantly manages the pace and rhythm of each sentence, paragraph, page and sequence. The effect is to find oneself (to quote the narrator) ‘suspended in a time of stalled duration’, becalmed on the sea of memory.’
Literary Review
That Was a Shiver, and Other Stories
‘I’ll die at the desk. So what, where’s the coffee? Forty-five years after that first collection of stories here I go with another. Ye cannay beat that feeling man it’s beautiful. A new collection of stories! What a marvel.’ James Kelman on the writing life is a braw thing indeed.
Guardian
“The arts protect consciousness”: Anthony Brandt – co-author of The Runaway Species with neuroscientist and writer David Eagleman – discusses types of creativity and the value of art (with the help of a string quartet).
“A new standard in post-apocalyptic fiction” – the Guardian like Anna quite a lot.
Robert Webb is taking his heartbreaking and hilarious memoir How Not To Be a Boy on tour!
“Haig is adamant that ‘one of the uses of the arts is to keep us sane’, and that ‘reading is a route out of yourself’. He is almost evangelical about the power of reading to do good. ‘I think books can save us and I think they sort of saved me,’ he says.”
Guardian