Two Calamities
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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.’
In Conversation
Andrzej Tichý & Nichola Smalley
‘In many ways, every author is a kind of extremely complex sampler.’
Death in Her Hands
Ottessa Moshfegh
‘Isn’t it sweet to look back at how my mind jumped to the most innocuous conclusion? That after so many years, at seventy-two, my imagination was still so naive?’
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 Flowers Look More Beautiful Now Than Ever
Mieko Kawakami
‘It’s hard to imagine a country where a lockdown would function perfectly, but in the case of Japan, which lacks basic individualism, the current situation has bred insidious hatred and division.’
This Happy
Niamh Campbell
‘How does a person waste her twenties like that? The answer of course being easily indeed. As easy as can 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.
Commuting Through Coronavirus
Kikuko Tsumura
‘My friend and her colleagues are being told not to get infected. Infections among employees will affect the company’s reputation, and would be an inconvenience to clients.’
Notes on Craft
Naoise Dolan
‘If something is usually done in novels, but I can’t actively justify doing it, then I don’t do it.’
The Kobold
Daisy Hildyard
‘In a plain material sense the condition of being alive is that of living inside this contradiction – being membrane-bound.’
Pew
Catherine Lacey
‘The church has no thoughts. The church is brick and glass. If they ever slept there, they would see that.’
Trees, Disease
Philip Marsden
‘The greatest problem with the recent enthusiasm for tree-planting is disease. Large-scale projects mean large-scale movement of tree stock, which in turn has helped spread a number of highly contagious arboreal pathogens.’
Notes on Craft
Alan Rossi
‘The whole universe emerges and lives through this little consciousness that we call our self.’
Thick Legs
Natalia Borges Polesso
‘Was soccer a sign? I don’t think so, nearly all the girls had boyfriends, except for Greice and Kelli, and I didn’t have one because I was a puta, as they used to say, I hooked up with everybody.’
Qualities of Earth
Rebecca May Johnson
‘Allotment earth is like the cache on a public computer, it holds too much information.’
I Remember
Georges Perec
Entries from Georges Perec’s I Remember, translated from the French by Philip Terry and David Bellos.
Forced Out
Kevin Maxwell
An excerpt from Kevin Maxwell’s exposé of structural racism in the British police force.
Diary of a London Lockdown
Poppy Sebag-Montefiore
‘The coronavirus seemed to demand immediate responses to the questions we’d been struggling with for years.’
Thrive: A Lyric Sequence
Jill Bialosky
‘Sometimes we could not see / anything before us. That’s what it / required.’
To All My Past Neighbors
Jessica Francis Kane
‘Connections are being forged, even as we keep our distance. Let’s hold onto them in the after.’
Jessica Francis Kane on neighbourliness in the time of COVID-19.
Forest as Metaphor
John Vink
‘Trees, mostly the older and weaker ones, were toppled by the wind, dragging neighbouring trees down, just like someone contaminated by the virus would contaminate another.’
The Paternoster: A Requiem
Mark Blacklock
‘To step into a paternoster lift is to step into the circulatory system of a building, to become a part of its very structure.’
Wherever Mister Jensen Went
Reyah Martin
Reyah Martin’s ‘Wherever Mister Jensen Went’ is the 2020 Commonwealth Short Story Prize regional winner from Canada and Europe.
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.’
