Overhead bullets concuss the air, disrupt Nzinga’s world. There’s no aim to the gunfire, no malice. A government patrol has stumbled on her father’s distant sentries, both sides firing blind in their mutual retreat.
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‘This is why he will survive this war to return to his wife and daughter, barring a blind bullet, an errant piece of shrapnel, some careless act of destiny.’
Overhead bullets concuss the air, disrupt Nzinga’s world. There’s no aim to the gunfire, no malice. A government patrol has stumbled on her father’s distant sentries, both sides firing blind in their mutual retreat.
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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.
George Makana Clark was raised in Rhodesia. He is the author of the novel The Raw Man and the story collection The Small Bees’ Honey. His work has appeared in The Granta Book of the African Short Story, The O. Henry Prize Stories and Tin House, among other publications. He teaches fiction writing and African literature at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
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‘Fifty years I’ve played here, except for stretches in Arizona and Mississippi, after my divorce.’
Fiction by Kate Lister Campbell.
‘I spend the afternoon scarifying ceilings. My neck and shoulders are killing me by the time I leave.’
Fiction by Rue Baldry.
‘I often see myself thrusting into soft clouds, hallucinating.’
Two poems from Chia-Lun Chang’s debut poetry collection Prescribee.
‘We experience, while still young, our most thoroughly felt desires as a kind of horizon.’
Anuk Arudpragasam on his second novel A Passage North.
‘But the crime did exist; it was Cuba itself.’
Translated from the Spanish by Frank Wynne.
‘The coronavirus seemed to demand immediate responses to the questions we’d been struggling with for years.’
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