‘My brother and I in the knee-deep water, standing in the tidal current, under Dyke Bridge.’
My brother and I in the knee-deep water, standing in the tidal current, under Dyke Bridge. We are hunting whelks. Yes, it is the water Mary Jo Kopechne drowned in. I know all about it. About Teddy drunk and how the story of what happened was less covered up than simply muddled. My brother tells me a…
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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.
‘For me the strange moments that make up our lives are plot.’
‘Your husband dies, you’re a widow. There’s almost joy in it. Why not scream it? Glory.’
‘When Allen Dorfman was gunned down in the parking lot of the purple Hyatt in Lincolnwood, my grandfather took great pride in the fact that one of our own was still high enough in the mob to rub out.’
‘How far can one deviate from the accepted pieties before one is kicked out?’
Brandon Taylor on naturalism and the future of fiction.
‘He takes the knife, cuts the barb from the body, sends it back to the depths of the river.’
An extract from Not a River by Selva Almada, translated by Annie McDermott.
‘The history of human thought, she would sigh despairingly, was nothing more, after all, than an arduous dream.’
