Translation: Teresa Galarza (Versión en español aquí) Shortcuts. On the shoulders of a country at war Like in the rearguard, in the front of Raqqa it is usual to sleep on the roofs of houses. You should take some basic precautions such as not smoking, lighting a flashlight or using a phone. Commander Botan repeats this to the eight men […]
Translation: Teresa Galarza (Versión en español aquí) Shortcuts. On the shoulders of a country at war Reaching a battlefront is much more complicated than it seems. Rarely, perhaps never, do we talk about the preliminary round after the bang-bang; the bureaucratic nightmare of special permits, photocopies, stamps, accreditations and meetings with those who are responsible for validating all documents. The […]
Translation: Teresa Galarza (Versión en español aquí) Shortcuts. On the shoulders of a country at war Some village in Raqqa. Clay houses cooking under the sun, a lot of sun, in the middle of nowhere. In Serran there are no sidewalks, no roads, no streets, no shops; just a donkey tied to a pole next to the remains of something […]
Translation: Teresa Galarza (Versión en español aquí) Shortcuts. On the shoulders of a country at war Two years have passed, but Amina remembers the day of the heads as if it was yesterday. Heads appeared punctured on garden trellises, traffic signs … There were also some in glass jars, up to a total of fifty that, they said, belonged to […]
Translation: Teresa Galarza (Versión en español aquí) Shortcuts. On the shoulders of a country at war The truth is that it’s not bad at all, twelve dollars a night for a room with a fan and a bathroom to yourself. We are the only guests of the only hotel in Kobani. The quintessential Kurdish “martyr” city is an obligatory stop […]
Translation: Teresa Galarza (Versión en español aquí) Shortcuts. On the shoulders of a country at war They are 1,500 men, between the ages of 18 and 30, who graduate after their 45-day training. Many have a moustache, others are not old enough to grow one. They are Arabs and Kurds about to be sent to fight against the Islamic State […]
Translation: Teresa Galarza (Versión en español aquí) Shortcuts. On the shoulders of a country at war On the world’s shoulders, the shortest distance between two points is rarely a straight line. Often, roads are blocked by checkpoints, mud walls or concrete blocks that require a diversion. It might also be that the road ends abruptly in the crater of a […]
(Versión en español) We meet with Kim Stanley Robinson (Waukegan, 1952) in Barcelona, during the annual literary convention Kosmopolis. Robinson is a respected and popular hard science fiction writer, especially known for his trilogy dealing with martian colonization and terraformation (Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars). After Mars, he imagined humanity expanding through the whole Solar System (2312) or trying […]
Photo: Alberto Gamazo (Versión en español) Desire, transgression, light. Nabokov. To keep a conversation with Lila Azam Zanganeh (Paris, 1976) causes genuine intellectual vertigo. This writer, born in Paris from Iranian parents, lives and works in New York and combines the creation of her literary works –The Enchanter was the first one, an unclassifiable literary artifact about her relationship with […]
Photography: Jorge Quiñoa (Versión en castellano aquí) Before starting the interview, the writer Brandon Sanderson (Nebraska, 1975) has lunch with his collaborators of Team Sanderson Spain and chats about Gaudí, chocolate with churros and the fact that Spain is the country with most fans in continental Europe. His epic fantasy novels include battles, death and some apocalypse or other, but on […]
