‘Partial, our protagonist, to the palatal; prone, too, to the plosive; and apt, you’ve heard, to alliterate.’
Soundlessly, one could say, or with the faintest ftt, the gates of Number 1 Port slid aside and Zunge stepped forward into a hail of crossfire. Dr Zero Zunge, Director of the Neo-Normative Universal Linguistics Laboratory, acronymically NNULL. From all sides silently lethal theta-rays (able to erase…
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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.
‘How far can one deviate from the accepted pieties before one is kicked out?’
Brandon Taylor on naturalism and the future of fiction.
‘On this fine, hazy day, the eyes are hazel, the tongue long and spackled with a white coating.’
Fiction by Fer Boyd, winner of The Space Crone Prize.
‘Our imaginations are in service to the wrong ends.’
Olivia Laing and M. John Harrison on the commodification of the imagination.
‘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.
‘in the Huangma Mountains, everything rots readily’
A poem by Zheng Xiaoqiong, translated by Eleanor Goodman.
