Knickers
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Stuck in Trees (with Apologies to Ian Frazier)
Jessica Francis Kane
‘On 8 January 2018, I noticed a large bunch of purple balloons in a tree near my apartment building.’
Dolores
Lauren Aimee Curtis
‘There she is: Dolores. Newly named. Sitting at the kitchen table inside the convent, conscious of how bad she must smell.’
Beetle
Joanna Kavenna
An excerpt from ZED, the forthcoming novel by Joanna Kavenna, a Granta Best of Young British Novelist.
Madam’s Sister
Mbozi Haimbe
‘The sister has a headful of fine hair down to the small of her back. The golden colour of maize silk, her weave is not stiff and waxy like Chipo’s, but moves in the breeze.’
The Resurgence of the Monstrous Feminine
Hannah Williams
‘Despite the sheer and uncommunicable amount of violence enacted upon the female body throughout history, it’s woman as terroriser, as beast, that we keep coming back to.’
The Girls and the Dogs
Kevin Barry
‘Maurice turns left, turns right, to loosen out the kinks in his neck. Images slice through him.’
In Conversation
Pallavi Aiyar & Poppy Sebag-Montefiore
‘There’s a lot I’ve written to you that I’ve never said to anyone else before simply because of how much you and I share.’
Boxing
Fatima Farheen Mirza
Fatima Farheen Mirza on navigating gender roles in a Muslim family, wearing hijab and learning how to box.
Death Customs
Constantia Soteriou
Constantia Soteriou’s ‘Death Customs’, translated from the Greek by Lina Protopapa, is the winner of the 2019 Commonwealth Short Story Prize.
All Silky and Wonderful
Ben Pester
A trip on a commuter train takes a surreal turn in new fiction by Ben Pester.
The Way to the Sea
Caroline Crampton
‘Alone in the silent dark, she traversed the mouth of the estuary in mile-long sweeps.’
My Mother Pattu
Saraswathy M. Manickam
Saraswathy M. Manickam’s ‘My Mother Pattu’ is the Asian regional winner of the 2019 Commonwealth Short Story Prize.
A Memory Palace for Brothers Who Flew Just Close Enough to the Sun & Created the Storm
Ellah Wakatama Allfrey
Ellah Wakatama Allfrey remembers Binyavanga Wainaina.
Screaming
Harley Hern
Harley Hern’s ‘Screaming’ is the Pacific regional winner of the 2019 Commonwealth Short Story Prize.
Mother and Son:
Life and Fate
Robert Chandler
‘Nothing made her happier than to sacrifice herself for her son’s happiness.’
A Season on Earth
Gerald Murnane
‘He had forgotten in the seminary how many distractions there were in the world.’
Distributed Denial of Service
Merritt Tierce
‘Once you learn to seal the shell, to make it watertight, you can let anything roil around in there.’
The Sole Purveyor of Madame Bovary in Beijing circa 1989
Amanda Lee Koe
‘In the day, his bevy of besotted rustics were coached in maxims of libertarian socialism. By night: rice wine orgies and folk punk sing-alongs.’
The Ungrateful Refugee
Dina Nayeri
‘I was born in 1979, a year of revolution, and grew up in wartime.’ Dina Nayeri on growing up in the Islamic Republic of Iran.
How I Write My Books
Anne Serre
Anne Serre on how she writes. Translated from the French by Mark Hutchinson.
Four Poems
Mark Waldron
‘Just look at those nasty trees flaunt / their leaves, each one a tra-la-la.’
Zanele Muholi: Somnyama Ngonyama, Hail the Dark Lioness
Zanele Muholi & Anne McNeill
‘Zanele Muholi is a photographer, often described as one of the most powerful visual activists of our time, and a long-time advocate for their black LGBTQ+ community.’
Loudermilk
Lucy Ives
‘The bro has a pair of plump dogs over which he deploys nauseating quantities of ketchup.’
In Conversation
Lucy Ives & Niina Pollari
‘For me, narratives are always tied to and emerging from other narratives; there is no single beginning, no origin.’
To Zinder
Sven Lindqvist
Obsessed with a single line from Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness – Kurtz’s injunction to ‘Exterminate All the Brutes’ – Sven Lindqvist set out across Central Africa, and wrote a book that revealed precisely what Europe’s imperial powers had exacted on Africa’s people over the course of the preceding two centuries.
