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'I HAVE LONG BEEN SUSPICIOUS of Aesop’s fable in which a hungry grasshopper comes across a bunch of ants drying out their grain in the winter sunshine and asks for something to eat. In an early version, translated from Ancient Greek by Olivia and Robert Temple, the grasshopper is a cicada. The ants ask why she didn’t store up food for the winter. “I didn’t have time for that,” says the cicada. “I was singing melodiously.”'
'“I’M WORKING ON THIS INFINITE BOOK,” said Robyn Davidson in a 2012 interview, “a memoir based loosely around my mother … It’s quite a difficult book. I started it 12 years ago. I feel absolutely that I have to write it and absolutely that I can’t write it.”'
