New Year’s By the Sea, Spinning Top and Cup
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The Lye of the Land
Derek Gow
‘One in seven British species is now threatened with extinction. Many more, from the grey wolf to the blue stag beetle, are already long gone.’
Creep
Caoilinn Hughes
‘She hadn’t been skiing since her master’s in Iceland, back when glaciers had some heft to them, though slackened and fast-diminishing as the legs of a retired cyclist.’
The Wolf at the Door
Cal Flyn
‘Wolves brook no bureaucracy. They do not believe in borders. It has been years since we have come face to face with apex predators in our own country.’
The Dragon’s Den
Tim Flannery
‘Just imagine the Australian inland with herds of rhino-sized diprotodon, as well as other gigantic marsupials, being preyed on by marsupial lions and Komodo dragons.’
The High House
Jessie Greengrass
‘All those who might have lived instead of us are gone, or they are starving, while we stay on here at the high house, pulling potatoes from soft earth.’
Pretty Polly
Shinichi Hoshi
‘Compared to all of you, I’m not the handsomest guy or the smartest, which might’ve caused me all sorts of grief if I was a landlubber. But I spent my life at sea, so I got by.’
An Unnecessary Man
Maha Harada
‘I’d lived for half a century, but I had no sense of what that meant; no particular reaction.’
Tongues of Fire
Seán Hewitt
‘Waking, close to morning but still
a shuttered, metal dark in the room’
Two poems by Seán Hewitt from Tongues of Fire, shortlisted for the 2020 Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award.
The Bookmobile
Kotaro Isaka
‘He told me he had quit his job the day after the earthquake and came out here with nothing but a sleeping bag.’
It Was a Dog
Amaryllis Gacioppo
‘She liked to eat until her thighs felt gelatinous and slick with sweat, and her stomach ballooned out, sore and firm as though she had drunk cement that had now set.’
Surviving Autocracy
Masha Gessen
We knew Trump’s range: government by gesture; obfuscation and lying; self-praise; stoking fear and issuing threats.
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 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.’
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.’
‘Doe Lea’
M. John Harrison
‘He was already suffering the attacks that would characterise the later stages of the illness, during which lights seemed to dance on the surface of everything. They were blue, lilac, pink and green, he said.’
The Museum of Whales You Will Never See
A. Kendra Greene
‘The Icelandic Phallological Museum is smaller than you’d think. The domestic collection of 212 specimens fits in one room.’
Feeling Bullish: On My Great-Uncle, Gay Matador and Friend of Hemingway
Rafael Frumkin
‘In his suit, with his pigtail and his montera, he was pure potential: he could be masculine vanquisher or gold-embroidered fairy. He was both, actually, at all times, and nobody who came to see him fight thought any less of him for it.’
A Woman of No Information
Caoilinn Hughes
‘Maud tries to understand how her role is being rewritten on the spot – who the woman might be.’
The Covid-19 Pandemic
Jane Goodall
Jane Goodall on animal welfare, the long history of zoonotic diseases and what we must learn from Covid-19.
The Kobold
Daisy Hildyard
‘In a plain material sense the condition of being alive is that of living inside this contradiction – being membrane-bound.’
Qualities of Earth
Rebecca May Johnson
‘Allotment earth is like the cache on a public computer, it holds too much information.’
Mafootoo
Brian S. Heap
‘She looks at her husband of fifty years, trussed up like a bewildered Christmas tree, all trailing streamers and twinkling lights, undecided about whether he is quick or dead.’
When A Woman Renounces Motherhood
Innocent Chizaram Ilo
Innocent Chizaram Ilo’s ‘When a Woman Renounces Motherhood’ is the 2020 Commonwealth Writers Short Story Prize regional winner from Africa.
Snap
Anouchka Grose
‘What a strange, terrible, exciting present – something you have to defile in order to appreciate.’
As if in Prayer
Steven Heighton
‘Many of the life vests were useless fakes, nylon shells that the human traffickers had stuffed with bubble wrap, boxboard, sawdust or rags.’
Clarity
Ruchir Joshi
‘I was close to my own father, which many people are not.’
Ruchir Joshi remembers his son.
What History Tells Us About Epidemics
Sandra Hempel
‘From when we first began living together in settlements, bacteria and viruses were with us, replicating, mutating and jumping species with extraordinary agility.’
The Lessons We Choose
Beth Gardiner
This will not be the last crisis. What can we learn from this one?
