Five Things Right Now: Carmen Maria Machado
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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.
Compartment
Ursula Scavenius
‘All I ask is that we arrive.’
A short story translated by Jennifer Russell.
The Blake Fellowship
Timothy Ogene
‘They call it POC here, you know, People of Colour.’
An excerpt from Timothy Ogene’s satire, Seesaw.
Donut County
Kate Lister Campbell
‘The fertility process is more like gambling than investment.’
Two women meet in an IVF clinic in this short story by Kate Lister Campbell.
Prologue
Eugene Lim
‘What was she ushering in and what was a grand program for which she was simply helpless agent?’
An excerpt from Search History by Eugene Lim.
Notes from an Island
Tove Jansson & Tuulikki Pieitilä
‘When we woke up, the whole ocean was full of broken ice.’
An excerpt from Notes from an Island, with artwork by Tuulikki Pietilä and memoir by Tove Jansson, translated by Thomas Teal.
Naomi
Sarah Hall
‘When I was eight, my mother died and Naomi arrived.’
An excerpt from Burntcoat by Sarah Hall.
A Page Pounded Clean
Kathryn Scanlan
‘There was no shriek, no gore, but the tail – it looked electrically charged.’
A story by Kathryn Scanlan.
A Stiff Flame from the Neck
Kathryn Scanlan
‘I gripped her and struck the wheel on her neck, but I couldn’t get it to spark.’
A story by Kathryn Scanlan.
In Conversation
Sarah Shin & Grace M. Cho
‘I’m drawn to the irrational because it has the potential to radicalise our senses.’
The authors discuss ghosts, transgenerational mourning and communal cooking.
Two Poems
Edmund Hardy
‘Feeling Real’ and ‘I Miss Myself / Shared Oranges’ by poet and filmmaker Edmund Hardy.
Two Poems
Radna Fabias
‘we welcome the applicant.’ Two poems by Radna Fabias translated by David Colmer.
The Overspill
Elaine L. Wang
Elaine L. Wang remembers friendship, flag-raising ceremonies and class elections at elementary school in Beijing.
Oldladyvoice
Elisa Victoria
‘I hope I never have to miss a playdate for catechism.’
An excerpt from Oldladyvoice, translated from the Spanish by Charlotte Whittle.
Larger than an Orange
Lucy Burns
An excerpt from Larger than an Orange, a book by Lucy Burns about abortion.
Talismans of Blood and Memory
Philip Kurian
On the worldwide campaign to return sacred objects to the ancestral communities from which they were taken.
