Conversations
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Introduction
Sigrid Rausing
‘But soon everything that had felt so tragic and dramatic to begin with – thousands of people ill and dying, the great pause, the intense dreams, the solidarity clapping – came to feel normal.’
A/S/L
Emma Cline
‘It was the afternoons that did it, three o’clock like a kind of death knell, the house seeming too still, too many hours of sunlight left in the day. How had Thora even started going to the chat rooms?’
At the Peckhamplex
Will Harris
‘the snow reflecting off / your torch was the / colour of your thoughts’
1 April 2020
Michael Hofmann
‘Living on money from the government, excused our duties and our liabilities, reducing our wants to eating and sleeping and what in the eighteenth century may have passed for exercise, the alderman’s stroll.’
The Perfect Companion
Joanna Kavenna
‘She was so understanding, so interesting, such an intellectual. She was also a wristwatch, but this hardly mattered.’
Arbos
Teju Cole
‘I made many pictures of such trees, and each time, some analogy to art would impress itself on me, the more so because of the universally locked museum doors.’
Still Life
Leanne Shapton
‘Because that’s what I’m doing a lot of; looking around the interiors I occupy, the corners of my occupied apartment.’
Power and Privilege
Ken Babstock
‘We do it all day every day until we can’t see. / We do it with a belt between our teeth.’
Open Bookkeeping
Jenny Erpenbeck
‘I write an obituary that appears in the newspaper that she always used to read while drinking her afternoon tea. I receive €170.03 for the obituary.’
Translated from the German by Kurt Beals.
Poem Written from Inside a Leather Pig Mask
Sam Sax
‘child who dreams of growing into / a swan only to wake in terror at a mouth / filled with feathers.’
Golden Vulture
Jason Ockert
‘Last summer, the boy still believed in miracles. That’s why he disobeyed his father and crossed the bridge. He wondered, back then, if his mother might be over there.’
Tête-à-Tête
Diana Matar
‘The features and expressions were uncannily contemporary. Some seemed to be mirror images of the people I had seen at the protest in Piazza del Gesù.’
The Temptation of St Anthony
Mark Haddon
‘He had not eaten today nor had he drunk. He would wait until the craving had passed, then allow himself to do both when it became a choice, not a lost battle in his long war against the base needs of the body.’
Yerevan, Armenia
Viken Berberian
‘Ever since the pandemic, our neighborhood is mostly deserted, except for the pigeons and statues.’
Le Flottement
Janine di Giovanni
‘Their lives were halted in time, a predicament they accepted with grace, sometimes even with humor. They appeared to be floating.’
The Fearful Summer
Adam Nicolson
‘I saw the bodies. They were blotched under the skin where the blood had clotted & pooled. I have never seen the dead so dead.’
Clementine, Carmelita, Dog
David Means
‘Here I should stress that dog memory is not at all like human memory, and that human memory, from a dog’s point of view, would seem strange, clunky, unnatural and deceptive.’
Labirinto
Wiktoria Wojciechowska & Lisa Halliday
‘But only a city without people is immune. Only a city in which nothing circulates, nothing changes hands, nothing flourishes.’
Lisa Halliday introduces the photography of Wiktoria Wojciechowska.
Daughter of Radium
Joe Dunthorne
‘As a child, my grandmother brushed her teeth every day with radioactive toothpaste.’
Spring
China Miéville
‘That after so many years of feeling that some Event was due, that something vast must surely happen, something vast happened. Is happening.’
How Things End
Ann Beattie
‘As I began to flip through a literary magazine, I was stopped by a photograph of myself as a young girl, standing beside my college professor.’
In Conversation
Avni Doshi & Sophie Mackintosh
‘I do wonder to what extent writing about motherhood is actually writing about being mothered’.
Two Poems
Emmalea Russo
‘I cannot look at you as I cannot look directly at the sun without my hand / covering my eyes’
Amnion
Stephanie Sy-Quia
‘In the place where I grew up there were horses, thighs moving like nudity under their fur’
The Skylight
Penelope Mortimer
‘Her body poured away inside the too-tight cotton suit and only her bloodshot feet, almost purple in the torturing sandals, had any kind of substance.’
The Colour Brown
Renu Sabherwal
‘It was, she thought, like trying on made-to-measure garments that have been tailored for someone bigger, smaller, rounder, thinner than you could ever hope to be.’
The Fascist Within
Vesna Maric
‘Yugoslavia’s ending, in bloodshed, cannot be its only legacy, the only lesson we take away from its existence.’
Three Poems
Vivek Narayanan
‘half-sunk / into ground for all those years / of negative subsistence’
The Doe
Daisy Lafarge
‘Never uncomplicated, affection between species is the cup of temperance whose waters run in both directions.’
