The Boat
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Introduction: Fate
Sigrid Rausing
The last time I wrote about fate was in an article for the Guardian on...
Domain
Louise Erdrich
‘Seven corporations control the afterlife now, and many people spend their lives amassing the money to upload into the best.’
Origin Myth
Mary Ruefle
‘Life continually circled in cold inaccessible serenity around unhappy Earth’
Key Stroke
Will Self
Striking the keys of the same typewriter that once sat under J.G. Ballard’s fingers, Will Self reimagines the legendary writer’s last days.
How to Get Over Someone You Love
Adam Fitzgerald
‘Would you like to come with me for some / old-fashioned inconclusive combat?’
Self-Made Man
Mark Gevisser
Mark Gevisser examines the personal, political and social issues of transgender identity in America.
Apparition
Mark Doty
‘an orange plastic basket of compost / down from the top of the garden – sweet dark, / fibrous rot, promising’
Some Heat
Miranda July
‘No one knows why ripping up a name makes a person call – science can’t explain it. Erasing the name also works.’
Miracles
Francisco Goldman
The violence the retablos depict, the calamities of fate, weather, accidents or of illness, move us because they distil so powerfully what we already know all too well.
The Ferryman Is Dead
Saša Stanišić
Here, more die than are born. There’s a refrigerator at the bottom of the lake. The ferryman is dead. No one is coming to take his place.
A Hebrew Sibyl
Cynthia Ozick
‘And so began what I was to become. To all these things – the admonitions and the testimonies, the rites and the annunciations – I had easily acquiesced.’
A Place on Earth: Scenes from a War
Anjan Sundaram
Dense forest and formless roads lead Anjan Sundaram to the sites of conflict in the Central African Republic in 2014.
Blasphemy
Fatima Bhutto
The tourists are gone. They’ve fled to Islamabad, along with the landlords and the hoteliers and the battalions of police that used to defend them, and certainty has left with them.
The Atlantic Wall
Ianthe Ruthven
This chain of Nazi fortifications stretching from the Norwegian Arctic to France’s western frontier with Spain is one of Europe’s least acknowledged monuments.
Where the World War Began
Joseph Roth
The World War began in Sarajevo, on a balmy summer afternoon in 1914. It...
The Alphabet of Birds
S.J. Naudé
‘She is standing there, her body like a lamp, waiting for the glass to break.’
In the Shadow of the Hospital
Tim Winton
‘All that yearning spilling down amid the treetops and roof ridges, a shadow I’d never properly considered before.’
Books and Roses
Helen Oyeyemi
‘A golden chain was fastened around her neck, and on that chain was a key.’
Tourist
Andrea Stuart
‘My curiosity about lesbianism was an accomplice of my feminism: a path that allowed me to be sexual and free.’
Living Goddess
Isabella Tree
‘I longed to know what she was thinking, what she did all day when she wasn’t performing rituals.’
Five Things Right Now: Dorothea Lasky
Dorothea Lasky
Dorothea Lasky, author of the poetry collection, Rome, shares five links of what she’s reading, watching and thinking about right now.
Laparotomy
Alexandra Lucas Coelho
‘At forty, I think the world leads to the body. Besides, laid out on a stretcher, you are your only home’ .
L.A. Diary: Notes from a Mexikorean Country
Juan Pablo Villalobos
‘I was reassured to see that my hotel does not resemble the one in The Shining.’
Ghosts
Brian Hart
‘The road pleasantly gained and lost elevation, flood gauges in dry washes and scraggy hilltops, corners that begged for two wheels not four.’
Cynthia Ozick | First Sentence
Cynthia Ozick
‘Some stories begin with an incident, or a set of enigmatic circumstances, or a scene indelibly witnessed, or the relationship of unlike temperaments, or even something as gossamer as a mood. And then there is the kind of story that is rooted in an idea.’
The Blood Drip
Brian Evenson
‘They had stumbled upon a town and tried to approach it, but had been driven off with stones.’
The Argentine Episcopate
Bernard Quiriny
‘I started working for the Bishop of San Julián in 1939, not long after the death of my husband.’
Relic Light
Eric Gamalinda
‘Unconfirmed stories that have been retold so often they acquire the polish of truth, like the rosary beads people here carry in their pockets and pull out whenever the need for reassurance arises.’
The Husband Stitch
Carmen Maria Machado
‘I have heard all of the stories about girls like me, and I am unafraid to make more of them.’
Frankenstein’s Mother
Darcey Steinke
‘If pain is what makes others real to us, there was not another human being more real to me than my mother.’
Dorothea Lasky and Adam Fitzgerald In Conversation
Dorothea Lasky & Adam Fitzgerald
‘I want to get to that place of cold neutrality where almost anything could work in poetry.’
