Le Flottement
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Julia Armfield | First Sentence
Julia Armfield
‘A first line is a threat, I think.’ Julia Armfield on the first sentence of her story ‘Longshore Drift’.
Love After Abuse
Lucia Osborne-Crowley
Lucia Osborne-Crowley on the complexity of navigating sexuality while recovering from sexual abuse.
we are seen by the world / what must be seen
Nisha Ramayya
‘oh dirty feet blood-clotter / oh grease monkey clod-hopper / oh cloud-devourer spit’
Facsimiles
Linda Mannheim
‘There is nothing where the Towers should be but smoke. There are no buildings.’
Three Poems
Chus Pato
‘you alone sit down at that table / facing the houses you tried to inhabit’
Translated from the Galician by Erín Moure.
Careless
Hiroko Oyamada
‘As I lay on the mattress, the white toe pads of the gecko floated up before me, against the vastness of the blue-black night. Rather than a presence, it seemed to me more like a trace, a barely discernible odour that flooded in on the air.’
Simon
Daniel J. O’Malley
‘When we pulled up at the house, Simon was there waiting, on the porch.’ New fiction by Daniel J. O’Malley
To the Dogs
Jianan Qian
A short story by Jianan Qian on stray dogs, desperation and re-education in rural China during the Cultural Revolution.
The Fallen
Carlos Manuel Álvarez
Read an excerpt from The Fallen by Carlos Manuel Álvarez, translated from the Spanish by Frank Wynne and available now from Fitzcarraldo Books.
The Emperor of Ice Cream
Rebecca Tamás
‘Death is terrifying and impossibly big, but life is even bigger – vulgar, relentless, ruthless.’
The Water Tower and the Turtle
Kikuko Tsumura
‘It was safe to say I didn’t really know anybody in this town at all.’ New fiction translated from the Japanese by Polly Barton.
Mail-Order Marriage
for Shy Brides
Molly Gutman
‘The husband, when we are introduced, will already be the husband.’
Lemons in Winter
Mika Taylor
‘I wonder why I am always the last to let go. I wonder if there is any amount that will ever be enough.’
Nina Leger | Notes on Craft
Nina Leger
‘To say nothing about her was the only way to allow her to be everything.’
Hammer
Adrian Van Young
‘I shift my weight right, where the hammer hangs down. Then left, then right, then left again.’
The Marriage Finger
Kathryn Scanlan
‘On the marriage finger was a gold ring topped with a big prong-set stone.’ New fiction by Kathryn Scanlan.
The Last Rite of the Body
Sophie Mackintosh
‘My ex-boyfriend dies, and we all gather to put our hands into his body.’ New fiction from Sophie Mackintosh.
Bookshelves: John Berger in My Family Album
Amitava Kumar
‘The contours of the family arranged on the bookshelf shifted.’
In Conversation
Joanna Kavenna & Peter Pomerantsev
‘We are real in an unreal reality, which we’re told is really real and that we’re actually unreal.’
The Spread
Ben Lerner
‘He began to feel less like he was delivering a speech and more like a speech was delivering him.’
Read an extract from Ben Lerner’s latest novel, The Topeka School.
Innards
Magogodi oaMphela Makhene
‘To pick the right heart, the old man said, you had to look for depth in the ruby, to prize a raw intensity of colour and a bright gold fat blanketing the angry muscle.’
The Line
Amor Towles
‘It didn’t take long for the citizens of Moscow to realize that if you had no choice but to stand in line, then Pushkin was the man to stand next to.’
Longshore Drift
Julia Armfield
‘She has never been very keen on the thought of herself as other people see her.’
Charlie Parker Plays Bossa Nova
Haruki Murakami
‘That was the setup for the review I wrote about this imaginary record.’ Translated from the Japanese by Philip Gabriel.
H+
Matthieu Gafsou & Daisy Hildyard
‘It’s a shadow-world: strangely familiar, all the same.’ Daisy Hildyard introduces Mattieu Gafsou’s photoessay on transhumanism.
