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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‘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.
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.
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‘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.’
‘Olga was noble. She was Amazonian. She felt exhausted and humiliated, but she also had force.’
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