Walker in Gaza

Alice Walker describes her visit to Gaza, and compares Apartheid Israel with the segregated American South where she grew up.

Camel Counting

Accountants look for consistencies; they don't look at realities. Provided the story is consistent, they're not bothered whether it's true.

--The Camel of Destruction by Michael Pearce

Memory and Lies

This month we consider writing on, and from, memory. Every autobiography has an unreliable narrator, and all writing is autobiographical, reflecting as it does a singular consciousness formed by unique experience. While some writers draw their narratives directly from life and produce memoirs clearly defined as such, others put their life stories to the service of fiction, rewriting the past in the transformation of life into art. Here characters revise their pasts in order to survive, then pass down those altered histories to their descendents, who in turn produce their own revisions. Political and personal borders shift and blur, rapture and grief are both detailed and elided, and one man’s moment is another’s (and another) story. Anna Enquist, Eduardo Halfon, André Kaminski, Eduardo Lago, Rouja Lazarova, Luan Starova, Jáchym Topol, Carles Torner, and Tomáš Weiss interrogate notions of truth, authenticity, and art in creating these compelling narratives.

--Words Without Borders, July 2009

Preserving Integrity

We were born into an unjust system; we were not prepared to grow old in it. The Price of My Soul refers not to the price for which I would be prepared to sell out, but rather to the price we all must pay in life to preserve our own integrity. To gain that which is worth having, it may be necessary to lose everything else.

--The Price of My Soul by Bernadette Devlin