Translated from the French by John Sturrock
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‘Nine beers, two Tuborgs, four Guinnesses.’
Translated from the French by John Sturrock
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‘Feelings can be very obscure but numbers never lie.’
Kevin Brazil on metrics, obsession and fitness.
‘An intense workout is an ecstasy of punishment packaged as self-improvement.’
Mary Wellesley on exercise, ritual and Barry’s Bootcamp.
‘I was not good at sports because I would not do sports because I did not have the body for sports because I would not do sports.’
Saba Sams on girlhood, embodiment and avoiding sports.
‘Following United rarely brings me any great joy and most often it depresses me. If I could disengage, I would.’
Jonny Thakkar on Manchester United.
‘I deployed my body against an opponent like a blunt and effective instrument.’
John Patrick McHugh on playing Gaelic football.
Georges Perec was born in Paris in 1936 and died in the same city four days before his forty-sixth birthday in 1982. His parents were Jews who had migrated to France from Poland; both died during the Second World War – his father as a soldier during the German invasion of France, his mother in Auschwitz-Birkenau. His works include Les Choses, which was awarded the Prix Renaudot in 1965, and W ou le souvenir d'enfance.
More about the author →John Sturrock is a writer, critic and translator. He is Consulting Editor at the London Review of Books. His translations include Stendhal’s The Charterhouse of Parma, Notre-Dame de Paris by Victor Hugo and Marcel Proust’s Days of Reading.
More about the translator →Entries from Georges Perec’s I Remember, translated from the French by Philip Terry and David Bellos.
‘When work is at mealtime, when is mealtime?’
Rebecca May Johnson on waitressing, hunger and eating at work.
‘What does that mean, vegan cheese? asks a lady who’d had no query about amuse-bouche.’
An extract from The Alternatives by Caoilinn Hughes.
‘it’s wrong / to let delicacies, even when suspect, go untried’
A poem by Natalie Shapero.
‘The recipe is a text that can produce spattering because it was spattering before it was language.’
Rebecca May Johnson on recipes, repetition and intimacy.
‘During the pandemic, birds (along with many insects and wild plants) have landed in my life and poems again.’
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