Two Poems
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In Conversation
Katherine Angel & Sam Byers
‘I was experiencing a sort of muteness and inhibition, a need to burrow away and think, quietly, alone.’
Katherine Angel, author of Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again speaks to Sam Byers, author of Come Join Our Disease.
Lice
A. K. Blakemore
‘I often had head lice as a child. Outbreaks circulated around my primary school on a seasonal basis.’
A new essay from the author of The Manningtree Witches.
Clara’s Parrot
Hebe Uhart
‘He laughs with a human laugh, a sinister and forceful cackle.’
Newly translated work from the Argentine writer Hebe Uhart.
Two Poems
Khairani Barokka
‘a powerful blast ignited in their latest attempt to grow lives in the dirt of your online receipt, human blood carries all kinds of filigreed debris’
In Conversation
Jeremy Atherton Lin & Kevin Brazil
‘My larger concern is that as we sequester online, our lack of imagination threatens to foreclose our respect for other people’s realities.’
Selected
Sam Byers
‘Across the country, at any given moment lives are unravelling in rooms of crushing uniformity.’
Undreamed Shores
Frances Larson
‘Miss C (who is fairly young and pretty) can’t go off by herself with a solitary man, however respectable, to live on the Siberian tundra.’
from Affiliation
Mira Mattar
‘on our knees in bathrooms internationally / dependent on a disguise of sovereignty’
An Ounce of Gold and Máxima Acuña Atalaya
Joseph Zárate
‘To end up with an ounce of gold – enough to make a wedding ring – you need to extract fifty tonnes of earth, or the contents of forty removal lorries.’
On Vulnerability
Katherine Angel
‘Is anyone an authority on themselves, whether on their sexuality or anything else?’
An excerpt from Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again.
Two Poems
Wendy Xu
‘Somewhere in America a white boss / in a dandelion dress-shirt is raising / his voice again’
Fat Bodies
Forsyth Harmon
‘Justine was at my lab table, pulling at the ends of her black bob, shoving her hair into her mouth.’
An excerpt from Justine, out with Tin House Books.
In Conversation
Madeleine Watts & Lucie Elven
‘The moments of relief in this awful year that will stick with me are roaming around at strange hours, walking in the middle of the road.’
Introduction
Sigrid Rausing
‘Perhaps in isolation a new form of communication is emerging, expressing what readers and writers have always told one another, via books and letters and on the literary stage: I hear you. You are not alone.’
Permafrost
Eva Baltasar
‘This never made sense to Roxanne, whose whole life was a treat.’
Translated from the Catalan by Julia Sanches.
I’ve Been Away for a While
Dan Shurley
‘When the world releases him from its oily grip will there still be a world?’
The Stinky Ocean
Ian Jack
‘It was a peculiar, alopecic landscape of hummocks and gullies, with patches of grass growing on what looked like white earth, and rarely a soul to be seen.’
In Bright Light
Paul Dalla Rosa
‘The hard thing, as Alice saw it, was that something bad had happened to her and it was private and then it wasn’t.’
Colville
Fergus Thomas & Duane Hall
‘You can really feel the horses, when you’re around them, you can feel their spirit coming to life.’
When the Cholera Came
Lindsey Hilsum
‘It was hard not to wonder if the disease was a kind of divine retribution – collective punishment for a collective crime.’
Victim and Accused
Vidyan Ravinthiran
‘I’m curious about the refusal to countenance a connection between disparate experiences – a route by which empathy could travel.’
The Scarecrow
Diaa Jubaili & Chip Rossetti
‘Just at the time of the ceasefire between Iraq and Iran in 1988, an infantry platoon discovered that they were in a minefield.’
Translated from the Arabic by Chip Rossetti.
Abbandonati
Rory Gleeson
‘One day, 200 people’s X-rays showed they needed intensive care in order to survive.’
Al-Birr Islamic Trust Morgue, Greenwich Islamic Centre, April 2020
Gus Palmer & Poppy Sebag-Montefiore
‘Palmer’s portraits of Kafil Ahmed sit alongside those of other people risking their lives to take care of others.’
My Phantoms
Gwendoline Riley
‘I’m not sure I even thought of him as a person, really. He was more just this – phenomenon.’
The Mezzanine, or: The Most Important Book About Nothing You’ll Ever Read
Joel Golby
‘It’s like taking an escalator trip into someone else’s mind for an hour, finding nothing of actual substance up there, and realising, as you retreat mournfully back into your own skull, that there’s nothing there, either.’
Death Takes the Lagoon
Ariel Saramandi
Ariel Saramandi on the sinking of the MV Wakashio off the coast of Mauritius.
In Conversation
Nadia Owusu & Caleb Azumah Nelson
‘Out of those roots, radical possibilities bloom. Future is created with each note.’
