NW 15 [antikvár]

Introduction Welcome to NW15, a vivid, surprising and political collection of some of the best new prose and poetry written in English this year. Get ready to fasten your seat-belts, because you will soon be at Heathrow airport, where so many people begin their knowledge of Britain. We will take you to Israel and Iraq, and after that to many other parts of the globe where English is sometimes spoken: China, Ethiopia, Ghana, Israel, Japan, South Africa. To safari lodges and gay clubs, to the gentle world of British bookshops and the violent world of war, to factory floors and haunted landings. You will find characters you don't meet every day, such as Andrew Crumey's blind cosmologist and Kerri Sakimoto's Japanese priest, and you will see new sides of people you might have taken for granted. Rahat Kurd elegantly subverts received ideas about why women wear veils, and Doris Lessing asks disconcerting questions about two men and a schoolgirl looking at paintings in London's National Gallery. Selma Dabbagh, a British Palestinian, tells her controversial story of a brutal Israeli raid on a Palestinian settlement through the eyes of a disaffected Jewish teenager, while Fiona Sampson and Pam Zimmerman-Hope reinhabit the terror and the snatched pleasures of Jews in the 1930s. In the last section of the book you will find out, from Julian Barnes, how a writer imagines himself inside two very different fictional beings, Ma Jian tells us what it is like to write when you are torn between two cultures, and Ursula Holden describes how, after a lifetime's work, writers may be 'punished by the gods.' And then there's dying, of course: poems by Rob Mackenzie and Robin Robertson flash forward to the chill and thrill of those 'Last Few Seconds'. Around 700 pieces came in, though what we editors actually saw had been pre-sifted by Helen Gordon at Granta. Much of the best