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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.’
Children in Tactical Gear
Peter Mishler
‘we watched the last / very colorful weapons / coming ashore’
Seeing Things
Emily LaBarge
‘The City of the city is jagged and spiky, tangled, twisted – burned down, paved over, rebuilt, unruly with wealth and poverty side by side, as they have always been.’
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.’
The Poetry Vaccine
Peter Pomerantsev
‘The quarantine and the closure of borders was giving my father Cold War flashbacks. And while Covid-19 was reducing life and death to statistics, father was using literature to affirm individuality.’
The Art of Waving
Andrea E. Macleod
‘I was only nine when I took to practicing the art of not waving. I felt an exhilarating power surge inside me and I ran all the way home, punching the air as I went.’
Whatever Happened to Queer Happiness?
Kevin Brazil
‘You never can wholly control the things you cling to. But you can figure out what has made you the surface you are.’
The Great Indian Tee and Snakes
Kritika Pandey
Kritika Pandey’s ‘The Great Indian Tee and Snakes’ is the overall winner of the 2020 Commonwealth Short Story Prize as well as the regional winner from Asia.
An Education
Ariel Saramandi
‘Once, early on, before he learned such things were never said, my brother approached a white boy in his class with my mother’s maiden name and said they must be cousins. The violence in my family’s home started a year or so later.’
