‘Was there a story? Yes, there was always a story .Did you write this one down? I've written them all down’.
It wasn’t really his story. I thought it was. I thought it had something to do with him–or one of his shipmates, at least. That it had happened on a boat he knew. But then I was reading to my son one night, and there it was in this book of sea stories.
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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.
‘The catastrophe had not happened to all of us, we began to understand, but to each of us.’
‘To the inexperienced, hurricane stories always sound like exaggerations.’
‘She got skinny and became a clairvoyant. And she wasn't even a stigmatic.’
‘Culture has been bound up since the beginning with extraction.’
The editor introduces the issue.
‘Many people in the country seem happy to accept mercenaries in exchange for stability.’
James Pogue on the Wagner Group in the Central African Republic.
‘Olga was noble. She was Amazonian. She felt exhausted and humiliated, but she also had force.’
