I grew up in the Ogaden, a semi-arid province of the world’s poorest empire, where the Ethiopian dollar was in such short supply that we used the East Africa shilling of the British colonies to the south-east. That we lived in an empire in rags and depended on the minting industries of a wealthier…
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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.
‘In a world in which coercion is the norm, a human trafficker must have underlings as well.’
‘Was the sunburn part of the shtick? she wondered while the video continued to play.’
A story by Megan Kamalei Kakimoto.
‘By the time I was in my teens, I had taken up an existence framed by a double negative: not male, not white.’
An excerpt from Tsitsi Dangarembga’s essay collection, Black and Female.
Ntsika Kota is the winner of the 2022 Commonwealth Short Story Prize for Africa.
‘What does it say about capitalism that we have money and want to spend it but we can’t find anything worth buying?’
Eula Biss on her book Having and Being Had.
‘Is the act of complicating a perfectly nice daydream a craft?’
Ben Pester on the craft of imagination.
