‘I have a proposition for you. From this moment on, you will do everything I tell you to do.’
An editor at Le Monde calls to invite me to write a short story for their summer series. These are supplements that appear on the weekends and enjoy a significant readership, it seems. Seven or eight thousand words on the subject of travel. My first impulse is to refuse, because I can’t come up wi…
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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.
‘Even today, she still speaks with emotion about Dorian, the transsexual so proud of her breasts, Diane, who weighed only sixty-five pounds, and Steven, who was so frightened of dying alone that Darcy wished she could promise to be with him when the time came.’ Emmanuel Carrère on addiction and poverty in an forgotten America.
‘We decided then to tell each other exactly how a typical fuck played out in our marriages. We couldn’t believe we’d never done this before.’
Fiction by Miranda July.
‘How far can one deviate from the accepted pieties before one is kicked out?’
Brandon Taylor on naturalism and the future of fiction.
‘I want the reader to be conscious of reading and not being just drawn into the book and forgetting themselves and forgetting their life.’
Claire-Louise Bennett on her novel Checkout 19.
‘What we’re about to see is greater than the thing you’re running from.’
