‘I don’t mean to be called Cristóbal. Cristóbal is my friend; I was going to say my best friend, but I’ll say he’s my only one. Gabriela is my wife. She loves me a lot and sleeps with Cristóbal.’
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‘My name is Marcos. I’ve always wanted to be Cristóbal.’
‘I don’t mean to be called Cristóbal. Cristóbal is my friend; I was going to say my best friend, but I’ll say he’s my only one. Gabriela is my wife. She loves me a lot and sleeps with Cristóbal.’
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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.
ANDRÉS NEUMAN's Fracture was shortlisted for the Premio Dulce Chacón and the Premio San Clemente Rosalía-Abanca, and is on the longlist for the Premio Gregor von Rizzori. His novel Traveller of the Century (2012) won the Alfaguara Prize and the National Critics Prize, and was shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award and the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. Talking to Ourselves (2014) was longlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award and shortlisted for the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize. Neuman was named one of the original Bogotá39, and one of Granta's Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists. He was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina and now lives in Granada, Spain.
More about the author →Trevor Stack is Director of the Centre for Citizenship, Civil Society and Rule of Law (CISRUL), as well as Senior Lecturer in Hispanic Studies at the University of Aberdeen. He holds a PhD in Anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Knowing History in Mexico: An Ethnography of Citizenship .
More about the translator →Julia Biggane is senior lecturer in Hispanic Studies at the University of Aberdeen. She is a general editor of the Bulletin of Spanish Studies, and director of the Sir Herbert Grierson Centre for Textual Criticism and Comparative Literary History at the University of Aberdeen.
More about the translator →‘Sometimes, in the midst of one of our arguments, he would say to me sadly, I understand you more if I understand less.’
‘And questions, more than heroes, are the material from which good stories are made.’
‘During the four hours they spent alone three times a week, Hans and Sophie alternated between books and bed, bed and books, exploring one another in words and reading one another’s bodies.’
‘1.In the waiting area of the Málaga airport for departing flights, a flock of birds nests on the beams. They fly back and forth across the high ceiling.’
‘Like him, the bathroom mirror had lost brightness over the years.’
‘When they stand on their hind legs, arms up, wrists limp, rats can take on a beguiling sort of personhood.’
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