‘Is it possible to run away without being a coward?’
He has never committed the indiscretion of admitting, especially to himself, that his desire to abandon the city was reciprocal – that it also desired to abandon him. To go away of one’s free will would be quite different from being expelled, or, worse, being seen as someone in flight. Would ren…
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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.
‘As a young man, I wanted to learn how to love, but in the end, I did nothing. I wanted to torture myself, but didn’t know where to begin.’
Fiction by Zou Jingzhi, translated by Jeremy Tiang.
‘There was a red patch, and what looked like a slightly raised piece of dead skin in the centre of my chest. Just to the right of where I assumed my heart was.’
An extract from Gabriel Smith’s novel Brat.
‘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.
‘On the third day, the little rosebud teacups rattled in their saucers as the war artist poured the coffee.’
