‘How did it feel to have a Jewish grandfather who owed his life to the friendship, or gratitude, or mercy, of Adolf Hitler?’
Early in 1943, an operative of the Office of Strategic Services or OSS, the wartime precursor of the CIA, made his way to an unkempt attic apartment on the fifth floor of a building in Creston Avenue, the Bronx. The operative, Walter C. Langer, was compiling what would become the world’s first psy…
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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.
‘They had believed they were coming to a new town. But, they said, Harlow wasn’t new: it looked old.’
‘Music, because of its abstraction, is the most difficult of all art forms to write about with exactitude and precision.’
‘Stopping has become a mutual desire. The things we want to stop. Mostly sounds of other people.’
A poem by K Patrick.
‘There is a sense of carnival mingled with outrage, especially for us since this is our first demonstration.’
Ike Anya on universities, financial cuts and student protest.
‘Slagman’s photographs counteract the medical narrative as well as the medical gaze.’
Alice Hattrick introduces photography by Julian Slagman.
‘The monstrous years of my late teens lay lined up alongside the rest of my life like bullets in a gun.’
A story by Sophie Mackintosh.
