‘Partial, our protagonist, to the palatal; prone, too, to the plosive; and apt, you’ve heard, to alliterate.’
Soundlessly, one could say, or with the faintest ftt, the gates of Number 1 Port slid aside and Zunge stepped forward into a hail of crossfire. Dr Zero Zunge, Director of the Neo-Normative Universal Linguistics Laboratory, acronymically NNULL. From all sides silently lethal theta-rays (able to erase…
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‘We meet at various points in the great swathes of the past that neither of us were alive to witness.’
Allen Bratton on a daytrip to a castle with his older boyfriend.
‘Listening to three white poets, whom I suspect are academics, talk about the state of poetry.’
Oluwaseun Olayiwola eavesdrops on an older generation.
‘I’d been dubious about his company at first.’
Sarah Moss on watching Shakespeare with her twelve-year-old son.
‘She didn’t trust us because, to her, tenants were like children.’
Kate Zambreno on negotiating with her older landlady.
‘A moment now swallowed in embarrassment, I asked a question only a young person might ask an older one.’
Lynne Tillman on trying to understand what makes a generation.
‘How far can one deviate from the accepted pieties before one is kicked out?’
Brandon Taylor on naturalism and the future of fiction.
‘On this fine, hazy day, the eyes are hazel, the tongue long and spackled with a white coating.’
Fiction by Fer Boyd, winner of The Space Crone Prize.
‘Our imaginations are in service to the wrong ends.’
Olivia Laing and M. John Harrison on the commodification of the imagination.
‘I want the reader to be conscious of reading and not being just drawn into the book and forgetting themselves and forgetting their life.’
Claire-Louise Bennett on her novel Checkout 19.
‘In 1777, a butcher's assistant from Cheshire, Samuel Thorley, was tried for murder at Chester Assizes.’
