‘Once there were blacks wanting to be white. Now there are whites wanting to be black.’
‘Beethoven was one sixteenth black,’ the presenter of a classical music programme on the radio announces along with the names of musicians who will be heard playing the String Quartets No. 13 Op. 130 and No 16 Op. 135.
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‘There’s this paradoxical nostalgia where even though yi suffered, yi miss it.’
Memoir by Graeme Armstrong.
‘She boils her sentences down to high-sucrose sweeties and calibrates her tone for maximum engagement.’
Fiction by Natasha Brown.
‘The monstrous years of my late teens lay lined up alongside the rest of my life like bullets in a gun.’
A story by Sophie Mackintosh.
‘Without waiting for me she removes her white shirt. Each button a piece of my own spine, undone.’
Fiction by K Patrick.
‘I followed him onto the dancefloor and he put his hands on my hips as if he’d known me for at least an hour.’
Fiction by Saba Sams.
‘Everyone will be quite safe if they stay in the car and please roll up the windows, says the host.’
‘And I'm careful what I say, I tell them about the blacks, how too many people spoil it for us, they robbing and killing, you can't blame white people.’
‘I correct the spelling because I’m a lawyer and I’m accustomed to precision in language; in legal documents the displacement of a comma can change the intention expressed in a sentence and lead to new litigation.’
‘It was scarcely worth noticing at first; an out-of-work lying under one of the rare indigenous shrubs cultivated by the Botany Department on the campus.’
‘She stopped where she was; sourness was in her mouth and nose, oozing towards the foreign stranger, she mustn’t go a step nearer.’
Jon McGregor on reworking his first published story from the female perspective, his enduring fascination with Lincolnshire and his new short story collection, This Isn’t The Sort Of Thing That Happens To Someone Like You.
