Jess Row | Interview
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Shining the Boot
Sarah Bernstein
‘I did my work and looked perfectly happy, tidy and unobjectionable, shining, shining the boot.’
New fiction from Sarah Bernstein.
The Schoolmaster’s Enemy
Missouri Williams
A new short story by Missouri Williams, author of The Doloriad.
Two Poems
Lee Young-ju
‘All I do is write in my sickbed diary. It’s been a while since I’ve done anything else.’ Two poems by Lee Young-ju translated by Jae Kim.
Three Poems
Eric Amling
‘They have friends everywhere / They have the iffy look of people that are free.’ Three poems by Eric Amling
Introduction: On Staying at Home
William Atkins
‘If the following pieces can be said to have an overriding characteristic, it is that they take seriously the experience of being a stranger.’
Guest editor William Atkins introduces the issue.
On Mistaking Whales
Bathsheba Demuth
‘The people who lived here lived in the heads of whales.’
A historian from New England goes to the Bering Strait.
The Steepest Places: In the Cordillera Central
Ben Mauk
‘In the mountains, however, Duterte seemed to have met his match.’
Ben Mauk meets the mountains of Luzon.
The Dam
Taran N. Khan
‘Invisible borders are not the same as open borders.’
Taran N. Khan on Hamburg’s Steindamm.
Travelling Secretary
Emmanuel Iduma
‘My life unfolded within the net effect of my father’s choices.’
Memoir by Emmanuel Iduma.
Graffiti Mobili
Jennifer Croft
‘The picture of a postcard is a geograft, a scion of a place thrust into the life of a resident of somewhere else.’
Jennifer Croft on graffiti and the history of the postcard.
The Ninth Spring: One Day at the Kolibi
Kapka Kassabova
Kapka Kassabova visits the Osmanovi family in the southern Balkans.
Tala Zone
Pascale Petit
‘Even when I travel as far as India, you are with me and I am re-entering our cellar.’
Memoir by the poet Pascale Petit.
A Wider Patch of Sky
Javier Zamora & Francisco Cantú
‘We’re so much more than those things. Citizen or undocumented. Border Patrol or immigrant.’
Letters between Javier Zamora and Francisco Cantú.
Boarding Pass
Carlos Manuel Álvarez
‘But the crime did exist; it was Cuba itself.’
Translated from the Spanish by Frank Wynne.
From an Untouched Landscape
James Tylor & Dominic Guerrera
‘It’s hard to find a spot where the colony hasn’t reached; the landscape is consistently interrupted.’
Dominic Guerrera introduces artwork by James Tylor.
回 | An Alley (Return)
Jessica J. Lee
‘I had never known an alley to be so green.’
Jessica J. Lee returns to Taipei.
Primitive Child
Jason Allen-Paisant
‘My roots seemed to be in the ocean; the ocean being symbolic of my absent father.’
Memoir by Jason Allen-Paisant.
Confluences
Kate Harris
‘The creek was fringed with tall grass and clear as breath.’
Kate Harris in the Taku River Tlingit First Nation.
From the Center of the World to the End of the World
Eliane Brum
‘For tourists to have this “experience”, six scientists were obliged to interrupt their research and wait until that afternoon, when the weather turned and time in the field shrank.’
Translated from the Portuguese by Diane Grosklaus Whitty.
I Know What Spring Is Like: Clarice, Crônicas and Corcovado
Sinéad Gleeson
‘A state of grace, Lispector writes, should be short-lived, episodic.’
Sinéad Gleeson on Clarice Lispector’s Brazil.
Slime
Susanne Wedlich
‘We are all creatures of slime, but some of us are more creative than others’.
An excerpt from the BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week, Slime.
How to Be a Revolutionary
CA Davids
‘How could anything be yours, intimately yours, and not belong to you at all?’
An excerpt from the new novel by CA Davids.
Notes on Craft
Scholastique Mukasonga
‘It was the 1994 genocide of the Tutsis that made me a writer.’
Three Poems
Fiona Benson
‘She offered herself in return / for her decimated town.’
‘Oarsman on the Drowning of Nisus’s Daughter Scylla’, ‘Pasiphaë on Her Granddaughter, Apemosyne’ and ‘The Chimp House’ by Fiona Benson.
Invisible Loyalty
Jan Morris
An essay on Welsh identity from Allegorizings, the final book from the late Jan Morris.
The Translator I Never Wanted to Be
Mariam Rahmani
‘Translation had always struck me as unsexy. Or perhaps something more insidious than that.’
On translating In Case of Emergency by Mahsa Mohebali.
Notes on Craft
Lucie Elven
‘I make a list of accidents – sentences I’ve misread with my misreading left in them.’
It Came from out of the Closet
Andrew McMillan
‘I had to say I was. I had to take the fear I’d held in my stomach for years, and bring it out into the light.’ An essay on anxiety, coming out, and the Goosebumps series.
A Hunger
Fran Lock
‘Both has a way of being neither.’
An essay by Fran Lock from the anthology Queer Life, Queer Love.
