It’s lost. All that is known of the poem are the following lines:
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It’s lost. All that is known of the poem are the following lines:
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‘I think there should be a National Service of Hospitality. The best way to see the true face of humanity is to serve it a plate of chips.’
Camilla Grudova on bad-mannered customers.
‘Anyone who has ever worked night shifts will understand the vertiginous feeling that comes with staring down the day from the wrong end.’
A.K. Blakemore on working nights.
‘I was constantly reading job ads, trying to find my holy grail – a job I could stand to do, and someone foolish enough to hire me.’
Sandra Newman on learning how to play professional blackjack.
‘I loved being a receptionist. What I loved about it was playing the part of being a receptionist.’
Emily Berry on being a temporary office worker.
‘Every part of you would swell, including your eyeballs, and no matter how much water you drank, you were always dehydrated.’
Junot Díaz on working for a steel mill.
Rick Gekoski is a rare book dealer, writer, former English Literature lecturer and the author of six books including, Tolkien’s Gown and Other Stories of Great Authors and Rare Books. His second series of Lost, Stolen or Shredded: The History of Some Missing Works of Art aired on BBC Radio 4 in 2009 and later adapted into a book in 2013.
More about the author →
‘He was “a Joyce, not a Joycean”, yet considered himself the supreme arbiter of what constituted valuable Joyce scholarship. At the same time, he admitted that he rarely read anything in full.’
James Scudamore on trying to ghostwrite Stephen James Joyce's memoir.
‘There’s this paradoxical nostalgia where even though yi suffered, yi miss it.’
Memoir by Graeme Armstrong.
‘In clothes, I met strangeness with strangeness. They dressed me with a kind of distanced power.’
Rosie Findlay on fashion and religion.
‘you gotta see this truck that ignored the height sign / on the underpass and now it’s lodged like an overlarge pill’
A poem by Nathalie Shapero.
‘I am aware that according to present-day criteria, the story I am about to tell contains several shocking scenes which fall within the realms of sexual harassment and cruelty towards animals.’
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