‘The Rwandan town of Nyamata is thirty kilometres south of Kigali, the capital'.
The Rwandan town of Nyamata is thirty kilometres south of Kigali, the capital. When I went there, the church was still filled with hundreds of bodies. Dogs had torn apart some of the remains, and I had to tread carefully for fear of stepping on a skull or a femur. Journalists had written of vomiting…
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‘The anglophone world, we have to infer, has run out of words for its own feelings.’
Daisy Hildyard on the wisdom of scarecrows.
‘What is the read receipt for?’
Lillian Fishman on texting, power and the ethics of leaving a friend on read.
‘Like pretty much everyone who uses the internet, I have seen many terrible things that I did not search for and that I cannot unsee.’
Rosanna McLaughlin on what the internet thinks she wants.
‘I have a pathological addiction to the internet, which I indulge with the excuse of making art. It rarely translates to anything good and mostly leaves me overstimulated and afraid.’
Paul Dalla Rosa on excess and the internet.
‘rumors of bees on speedwell, / no oxidative stress just / effortless pollination’
Two poems by Sylvia Legris.
‘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.
‘I came to feel that I was hiding here in the physical world, like a child who hides in a computer game to escape a more consequential reality.’
Tao Lin on his spiritual awakening, via psychedelics and the literature of near-death experiences.
‘I think I stayed with the text for as long as I needed to give meaning to my grief, crying not in Johanna’s absence but with her.’
Sigrid Rausing on transcribing, translating and editing Johanna Ekström’s final notebooks.
‘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 settled in, decades ago, to the idea that I was just going to write from a gay position, without explanation or excuse.’
Alan Hollinghurst on writing from the outsider’s perspective and cataloguing queer life.
‘The train wheels, now authorized to take up their song of distance, clacked and clattered their traditional shanty of miles.’
