I grew up in the Ogaden, a semi-arid province of the world’s poorest empire, where the Ethiopian dollar was in such short supply that we used the East Africa shilling of the British colonies to the south-east. That we lived in an empire in rags and depended on the minting industries of a wealthier…
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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.
‘In a world in which coercion is the norm, a human trafficker must have underlings as well.’
‘Was the sunburn part of the shtick? she wondered while the video continued to play.’
A story by Megan Kamalei Kakimoto.
‘By the time I was in my teens, I had taken up an existence framed by a double negative: not male, not white.’
An excerpt from Tsitsi Dangarembga’s essay collection, Black and Female.
Ntsika Kota is the winner of the 2022 Commonwealth Short Story Prize for Africa.
‘What does it say about capitalism that we have money and want to spend it but we can’t find anything worth buying?’
Eula Biss on her book Having and Being Had.
‘Q: When is a factory not a factory? A: When it’s a chocolate factory.’
