You hope that when your book is published, it will break out…While I’d been planning, pushing, and preparing for my book launch, mutated white blood cells in my daughter’s body had been stealthily multiplying, on a mission to crowd her healthy blood cells out of her marrow and her bloodstream completely. But their success, unlike my book’s, was inevitable.
Jane Roper, “The Book That Didn’t Break Out and the Disease That Did.”
Sometime during the summer of 1986 I went with my family to see a circus version of Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita in an outdoor theatre in Kreuzberg, West Berlin. My only memory of the production is of Margarita herself on a trapeze, her laughter vampish and defiant, as she sliced the air above us. By then we were nearing the end of the Cold War though at the time no one knew it, and right there in a courtyard, metres away from the Wall, was this exultant and ephemeral expression of the conquest of space.

The conquest of space. The phrase comes up again and again as I sift through dozens of Soviet documents of the period. By 1986 the ardent years of the Space Age were of course over, its most notable vestiges a few space stations orbiting Earth, but the embers still retain a beguiling, and decidedly nostalgic, glow.
Chloe Aridjis, “Into the Cosmos”. Don’t miss this piece or Teju Cole’s essay on going blind. It’s a Granta double shot, and we’re all thirsty.