Insomnia of the Statues
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The Kobold
Daisy Hildyard
‘In a plain material sense the condition of being alive is that of living inside this contradiction – being membrane-bound.’
Pew
Catherine Lacey
‘The church has no thoughts. The church is brick and glass. If they ever slept there, they would see that.’
Trees, Disease
Philip Marsden
‘The greatest problem with the recent enthusiasm for tree-planting is disease. Large-scale projects mean large-scale movement of tree stock, which in turn has helped spread a number of highly contagious arboreal pathogens.’
Notes on Craft
Alan Rossi
‘The whole universe emerges and lives through this little consciousness that we call our self.’
Thick Legs
Natalia Borges Polesso
‘Was soccer a sign? I don’t think so, nearly all the girls had boyfriends, except for Greice and Kelli, and I didn’t have one because I was a puta, as they used to say, I hooked up with everybody.’
Qualities of Earth
Rebecca May Johnson
‘Allotment earth is like the cache on a public computer, it holds too much information.’
I Remember
Georges Perec
Entries from Georges Perec’s I Remember, translated from the French by Philip Terry and David Bellos.
Forced Out
Kevin Maxwell
An excerpt from Kevin Maxwell’s exposé of structural racism in the British police force.
Diary of a London Lockdown
Poppy Sebag-Montefiore
‘The coronavirus seemed to demand immediate responses to the questions we’d been struggling with for years.’
Thrive: A Lyric Sequence
Jill Bialosky
‘Sometimes we could not see / anything before us. That’s what it / required.’
To All My Past Neighbors
Jessica Francis Kane
‘Connections are being forged, even as we keep our distance. Let’s hold onto them in the after.’
Jessica Francis Kane on neighbourliness in the time of COVID-19.
Forest as Metaphor
John Vink
‘Trees, mostly the older and weaker ones, were toppled by the wind, dragging neighbouring trees down, just like someone contaminated by the virus would contaminate another.’
The Paternoster: A Requiem
Mark Blacklock
‘To step into a paternoster lift is to step into the circulatory system of a building, to become a part of its very structure.’
Wherever Mister Jensen Went
Reyah Martin
Reyah Martin’s ‘Wherever Mister Jensen Went’ is the 2020 Commonwealth Short Story Prize regional winner from Canada and Europe.
Mafootoo
Brian S. Heap
‘She looks at her husband of fifty years, trussed up like a bewildered Christmas tree, all trailing streamers and twinkling lights, undecided about whether he is quick or dead.’
When A Woman Renounces Motherhood
Innocent Chizaram Ilo
Innocent Chizaram Ilo’s ‘When a Woman Renounces Motherhood’ is the 2020 Commonwealth Writers Short Story Prize regional winner from Africa.
On Alice Coltrane
Ashley Kahn
‘I habitually compartmentalize, until an artist so singular and unrooted reminds me to reboot my thinking.’
Carrot Bread
Annabel Banks
‘A short story is a loose-knit sweater, a trawler’s net, where the spaces and holes are inseparable from the whole.’
Fracture
Andrés Neuman
‘Sometimes, in the midst of one of our arguments, he would say to me sadly, I understand you more if I understand less.’
Plague Diary: April
Gonçalo M. Tavares
‘Pictures from some cities in Latin America: the burning in front of the family home of the dead who are not collected by the state.’
Introduction
Rana Dasgupta
‘We cherish communion, exchange and intercourse, of course, but also distance, seclusion and defence. Talk of membranes, therefore, is never entirely literal.’
Tissue
Tishani Doshi
‘Even if you could walk through the corridors / of your body, you would not know which rooms / to enter, which were full of stone.’
Newts
Anita Roy
‘Under a microscope, its skin looks lacy and netted, and it is this very porousness that makes these creatures so vulnerable.’
Hold Your Fire
Chloe Wilson
‘While waiting for his faecal transplant, my husband wasn’t as fun as he used to be.’
Laxmi
Anita Khemka & Rana Dasgupta
‘Anita’s documentation of Laxmi developed into what has become a lifelong friendship bound by photography.’
Rana Dasgupta introduces the photography of Anita Khemka.
The Station
J. Robert Lennon
‘You’re gonna want to go down the other side of the mountain and check out the Facility. Don’t do it.’
Secondhand
Mónica de la Torre
‘Eerily animated, it’s as if the gloves persist in their attempt to express something that can’t be reduced to words, something untranslatable.’
Hair
Mahreen Sohail
‘The first person he tells is his girlfriend of one year. I’m going to donate my hair to my mother, he says, and is worried to see tears rise in her eyes.’
Learning to Sing
Lydia Davis
‘You discover during your very first lessons that the problem of singing better involves overcoming many other problems you had not ever imagined.’
Snap
Anouchka Grose
‘What a strange, terrible, exciting present – something you have to defile in order to appreciate.’
