Shelter County, West Virginia. Late July 1963.
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‘No one was safe walking to church in the dark, but Buddy knew better than to beg not to go'.
Shelter County, West Virginia. Late July 1963.
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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.
Jayne Anne Phillips is the author of two short-story collections, Black Tickets and Fast Lanes, and four novels, Machine Dreams, Shelter, Termites and MotherKind, which was shortlisted for the Orange Prize in 2001. She directs the MFA Program at Rutgers-Newark, the State University of New Jersey. ‘Solly and Lark’, which appeared in Granta 100, is taken from her novel Termite.
More about the author →‘It's like by the time he was born there was too much to know.’
‘After the birth and the overnight in the hospital she didn’t go downstairs for a week.’
‘The sky burned white to blond to powder to an almighty blue; the sun fell unobstructed.’
‘I was vanished, invisible, another apartment left empty behind me, my possessions given away, thrown away, packed away in taped boxes fit into an available vehicle.’
‘I nursed a precocious rage at the stratagems society was employing to keep me from seeing naked women.’
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