Maureen N. McLane in Conversation
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Golden Vulture
Jason Ockert
‘Last summer, the boy still believed in miracles. That’s why he disobeyed his father and crossed the bridge. He wondered, back then, if his mother might be over there.’
Tête-à-Tête
Diana Matar
‘The features and expressions were uncannily contemporary. Some seemed to be mirror images of the people I had seen at the protest in Piazza del Gesù.’
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.’
Yerevan, Armenia
Viken Berberian
‘Ever since the pandemic, our neighborhood is mostly deserted, except for the pigeons and statues.’
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.’
The Fearful Summer
Adam Nicolson
‘I saw the bodies. They were blotched under the skin where the blood had clotted & pooled. I have never seen the dead so dead.’
Clementine, Carmelita, Dog
David Means
‘Here I should stress that dog memory is not at all like human memory, and that human memory, from a dog’s point of view, would seem strange, clunky, unnatural and deceptive.’
Labirinto
Wiktoria Wojciechowska & Lisa Halliday
‘But only a city without people is immune. Only a city in which nothing circulates, nothing changes hands, nothing flourishes.’
Lisa Halliday introduces the photography of Wiktoria Wojciechowska.
Daughter of Radium
Joe Dunthorne
‘As a child, my grandmother brushed her teeth every day with radioactive toothpaste.’
Spring
China Miéville
‘That after so many years of feeling that some Event was due, that something vast must surely happen, something vast happened. Is happening.’
How Things End
Ann Beattie
‘As I began to flip through a literary magazine, I was stopped by a photograph of myself as a young girl, standing beside my college professor.’
In Conversation
Avni Doshi & Sophie Mackintosh
‘I do wonder to what extent writing about motherhood is actually writing about being mothered’.
Two Poems
Emmalea Russo
‘I cannot look at you as I cannot look directly at the sun without my hand / covering my eyes’
Amnion
Stephanie Sy-Quia
‘In the place where I grew up there were horses, thighs moving like nudity under their fur’
The Skylight
Penelope Mortimer
‘Her body poured away inside the too-tight cotton suit and only her bloodshot feet, almost purple in the torturing sandals, had any kind of substance.’
The Colour Brown
Renu Sabherwal
‘It was, she thought, like trying on made-to-measure garments that have been tailored for someone bigger, smaller, rounder, thinner than you could ever hope to be.’
The Fascist Within
Vesna Maric
‘Yugoslavia’s ending, in bloodshed, cannot be its only legacy, the only lesson we take away from its existence.’
Three Poems
Vivek Narayanan
‘half-sunk / into ground for all those years / of negative subsistence’
The Doe
Daisy Lafarge
‘Never uncomplicated, affection between species is the cup of temperance whose waters run in both directions.’
‘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.’
Knickers
Colwill Brown
‘They’d practiced it ont bus into town: to mek sure Kel gorrin, they’d go past bouncer together, talking reyt loud about periods, so he wouldn’t even bother asking Kel her date of birth.’
True Story
Toyin Ojih Odutola & Yaa Gyasi
‘What if our art had not been stolen, our people not enslaved? What if we imagined a good story, a righteous and just story, and then we worked to make it true?’
In Conversation
Anthony Caleshu & Peter Gizzi
‘Words are haunted. Think of it: as long as there have been soldiers there have been poets. I have often felt that being a poet is a form of civil disobedience.’
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.’
The Celebration
Cathy Sweeney
‘I had just come home from boarding school when Father took me aside and told me that Mother was up to her old antics, letting the whole family down, and that if she continued, we’d have to act.’
This Compost: Erotics of Rot
Elvia Wilk
‘Mushrooms sprout from the bathtub grout; disintegrating apples overflow from the trash can. Insects circle. The decomposition is lively and sensorially overwhelming.’
Mother-Wit
Jeffery Renard Allen
‘It would be many years before I understood that around my mother’s sober acceptance of the status quo was a whole culture she had developed for our subsistence and well-being.’
Bonsai
Guadalupe Nettel
‘Bonsai have always prompted a kind of fear in me, or at least a puzzling discomfort.’
Mr A
Stephanie Soileau
‘At the front of the line, Jabowen and Mr A are talking. Or, more than talking, really. Julie has noticed this before – it’s impossible to miss – but today it worries her more deeply than she can quite admit.’
