‘If he fell in I would jump straight after, I would plumb through water not cold so much as oily, and dark as a dirty wine bottle.’
Kiddio was between shoe sizes when we went to my cousin’s wedding in a superannuated church that smelled of cooked dust. All day he tottered like a sandpiper to cope with his Pumas’ constriction. Before we lit out for the journey he walloped my hand away when I tried to slacken his laces, and th…
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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 this new series, we give authors a space to discuss the way they write – from technique and style to inspirations that inform their craft.
‘It’s the small stuff – and here I mean the odd particulate matter of daily life – that lets me access the sprawl of a place that wasn’t mine but has incrementally become so.’
Mary O’Donoghue on why Mavis Gallant‘s ‘Mlle. Dias de Corta’ is the best story of 1992.
‘When and where does the crisis of war begin and end?’
Y-Dang Troeung on the longevity of war.
‘Nine years after publication, Erdrich’s text still feels timely, even urgent.’
Larissa Pham’s best book of 2012.
