At first the Gypsies didn’t know how to answer their cellphone. Toshev had sent it to them in a box with written instructions, but every time he called, the phone went straight to voicemail. ‘Gypsies can’t read,’ his editor told him. ‘No disrespect to you, my boy, but that’s a fact. And …
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‘The anglophone world, we have to infer, has run out of words for its own feelings.’
Daisy Hildyard on the wisdom of scarecrows.
‘What is the read receipt for?’
Lillian Fishman on texting, power and the ethics of leaving a friend on read.
‘Like pretty much everyone who uses the internet, I have seen many terrible things that I did not search for and that I cannot unsee.’
Rosanna McLaughlin on what the internet thinks she wants.
‘I have a pathological addiction to the internet, which I indulge with the excuse of making art. It rarely translates to anything good and mostly leaves me overstimulated and afraid.’
Paul Dalla Rosa on excess and the internet.
‘rumors of bees on speedwell, / no oxidative stress just / effortless pollination’
Two poems by Sylvia Legris.
‘Few people can pinpoint where Bulgaria is on the map. Some people might tell you they can, but you shouldn’t believe them.’
‘It was an old woman’s racism that inspired the first line of ‘Blood Money’.’
‘I’m talking now of Mr Delchev’s bravery; of his books rightly loved by a faithful following of Bulgarian readers; of his words, still untranslated, which one day, I hope, will ring out in many foreign tongues.’
‘Every time I tried to write more, it turned out to be a fruitless endeavor – I felt like I was trapped in a sealed room with no windows.’
Fiction by Yu Hua, translated by Michael Berry.
‘How far can one deviate from the accepted pieties before one is kicked out?’
Brandon Taylor on naturalism and the future of fiction.
‘It was about doing what sons were bound to do, which was not to pussyfoot around.’
