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  … Gideon’s knife moved softly, swiftly, over the white card. My hair was wet from the post-work shower and I stood way back so as not to splotch my husband’s work. It always looked less like cutting and more like stroking.

The Return of Postcolonialism and the Dead: Postcolonial Gothic Literature and Hong Kong by Calvin Fung … Writing and artwork in the recently published Wasafiri special issue, ‘Writing Hong Kong’, capture the tense political climate that Hong Kong is experiencing.

It was one of those grey days when even the best plans seem ill fated, Monday and the school holiday. Mum and I were going shopping. She particularly wished to buy me something for the disco on Thursday. I think she felt, having been ill for months, she had neglected me.

The classroom was devoid of its usual liveliness and chatter. The stillness of the air seemed to have had a soporific effect on its occupants. Even the gecko suspended upside-down on the ceiling was stationary. A thick blanket of heat engulfed the room, making it oppressive and stifling.

On the spur of the moment, Scott decided to take a leave of absence from his job, to see Goya's giant tapestry cartoons, among the jewels of the Prado Museum in Madrid. Since his mother's funeral, two months before, he'd been finding it difficult to sit at his cluttered desk.

Il était un petit navire … Qui n’avait jamais navigué. … Ohé! Ohé! … (Traditional French children’s song)   … Petit Navire by  Mehran Waheed … Monsters hide beneath your jungle hair, itching to settle like … Migrant lice, refugee nits, Islamic ticks burrowed within your scalp.

It was 3.30pm on a winter’s day. I heard a scream and pushed open the door. The floral curtains were wide open in our bay window. If Dad had been home, the curtains would have been drawn, he didn’t like people to stare in.

Samira wanted me to say yes. She’d asked if I could accompany her to an exhibition later that day. Though this was the kind of thing I hated, it was impossible to say no to Samira with my head resting on the softness of her thigh, with her hands twisting my hair into Bantu knots.

Know Your Place is a collection of essays on working class experiences by 22 writers including Kit de Waal, Durre Shahwar Mughal and Catherine O’Flynn.

Bare Lit Anthology reviewed by Dzifa Benson … On the one hand, it’s a shame that a book such as the Bare Lit anthology is necessary.

Monique Roffey was born in Port of Spain, Trinidad and educated in the UK. She is the author of six books, five novels and a memoir. Three of her novels are set in Trinidad and the Caribbean region.

Ray … 1. Ray and I got suspended from school for a whole week and we were the only two kids around to enjoy it.

New Delhi and Kot Badal Khan, India; Lahore, Pakistan, August 1967 Poor Raju was having the same dream again. In it, he was once more the boy he had been, aged seven years old. “Water, water!” he demanded in his child’s piping voice, tugging at the man’s arm.

Saadat Hasan Manto was an Indo-Pakistani writer, playwright, and author considered among the greatest writers of short stories in South Asian history. Here we reproduce one of his letters (translated from Urdu by Khalid Hasan) to Uncle Sam i.e. the USA, by kind permission of the Universal Poetries website. 

I’ve known Neel Mukherjee for about eight years. A mutual friend introduced us in Bombay a couple of years after his first novel, Past Continuous, was published in India and had gone on to win the Crossword Book Award for Fiction. When Neel and I met, I was working for ELLE in Bombay.

Green Eyed                                                                                                                              … Due to a genetic mutation which occurred 6,000-10,000 years ago,  all blue-eyed people share an ancestor  from the Caucasian region…

In exactly two months, it would be her ninety-ninth birthday. This they murmured repeatedly, although sometimes she thought it had been only once. Between bouts of dozing, her eyes wandered over the walls and ceiling, often returning to a tiny wisp of abandoned cobweb in one corner.

Olivia Laing is a British writer and cultural critic. She is the author of three books: To the River, The Trip to Echo Spring and The Lonely City. Her tale 'The Abandoned Person's Tale' appears in Refugee Tales: Volume II, which is out now from Comma Press.

A review of Arundhati Roy's The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. 

In this fiction piece, the narrator finds herself falling for her sister's new love interest. Torn between loyalty to her sister and her desire, she struggles to control her emotions.

In 2011 I interviewed novelist Anna Lawrence at Pow Wow Festival of Writing. Soon after, she invited me and two other Birmingham writers, Elisabeth Charis and Kit de Waal, to get together to write, as Natalie Goldberg says, ‘with a rounded belly’; WRB was born and we’ve been meeting ever since.

Chicken a bawl … We used to keep chickens in the backyard. They came to us by way of My Uncle Sam’s Ford Cortina; yellow exterior, black roof and two furry dice hanging from the rear view mirror. Class.

Having been shortlisted for the Orange Prize for her novels All the Blood Is Red and Orange Laughter, critically acclaimed author and lecturer Leone Ross returns with Come Let Us Sing Anyway, a raucous, vibrant collection of short stories that rattles along, genre hopping with chameleon-like gusto.