The Heart Compared to a Seed, c.1508 (after Leonardo da Vinci)
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Carrot Bread
Annabel Banks
‘A short story is a loose-knit sweater, a trawler’s net, where the spaces and holes are inseparable from the whole.’
Fracture
Andrés Neuman
‘Sometimes, in the midst of one of our arguments, he would say to me sadly, I understand you more if I understand less.’
Plague Diary: April
Gonçalo M. Tavares
‘Pictures from some cities in Latin America: the burning in front of the family home of the dead who are not collected by the state.’
Introduction
Rana Dasgupta
‘We cherish communion, exchange and intercourse, of course, but also distance, seclusion and defence. Talk of membranes, therefore, is never entirely literal.’
Tissue
Tishani Doshi
‘Even if you could walk through the corridors / of your body, you would not know which rooms / to enter, which were full of stone.’
Newts
Anita Roy
‘Under a microscope, its skin looks lacy and netted, and it is this very porousness that makes these creatures so vulnerable.’
Hold Your Fire
Chloe Wilson
‘While waiting for his faecal transplant, my husband wasn’t as fun as he used to be.’
Laxmi
Anita Khemka & Rana Dasgupta
‘Anita’s documentation of Laxmi developed into what has become a lifelong friendship bound by photography.’
Rana Dasgupta introduces the photography of Anita Khemka.
The Station
J. Robert Lennon
‘You’re gonna want to go down the other side of the mountain and check out the Facility. Don’t do it.’
Secondhand
Mónica de la Torre
‘Eerily animated, it’s as if the gloves persist in their attempt to express something that can’t be reduced to words, something untranslatable.’
Hair
Mahreen Sohail
‘The first person he tells is his girlfriend of one year. I’m going to donate my hair to my mother, he says, and is worried to see tears rise in her eyes.’
Learning to Sing
Lydia Davis
‘You discover during your very first lessons that the problem of singing better involves overcoming many other problems you had not ever imagined.’
Snap
Anouchka Grose
‘What a strange, terrible, exciting present – something you have to defile in order to appreciate.’
from the knotweed sonnets
Andrew McMillan
‘sometimes I need / the sound of something pulled up from the roots / and tossed aside’
You Are Here, You Are Not a Ghost
Mark Doty
‘Does it make you a little ghostly yourself, when what’s gone is more present for you than what’s here?’
Nation
Tishani Doshi
‘Understand friend, the conscience is a delicate broth. / Sometimes it feels good to be bad.’
Diminishing Returns
Fatin Abbas
‘Alex had been sent to this remote district between north and south Sudan to update maps. It was an information-gathering project run by an American NGO based in the capital, Khartoum, nine hundred kilometers to the north.’
Crimes of Space
Eyal Weizman & Rana Dasgupta
‘Architecture can be employed as a form of violence and violation.’
Border Documents
Arturo Soto
‘The twin cities of El Paso and Ciudad Juárez lie either side of the US–Mexico border.’
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.’
Species
Tishani Doshi
‘Will it be for them / as it was for us, impossible to imagine oceans where there are now / mountains?’
The Lake
Kapka Kassabova
‘The chalky mountain separates the lake from its higher, non-identical twin, but only overground. Underground, they are connected. Ohrid and Prespa: two lakes, one ecosystem.’
Between Light and Storm
Esther Woolfson
‘We’ve always been entwined in life and in death with other creatures, although often too much time has elapsed to be able to interpret with any certainty what some of these symbols and artefacts mean.’
Click-Wrap
Ida Börjel
‘You know about my / emotional drinking, and my night walks and my / fragmented heart-to-heart conversations.’
All Species Have the Same Life
Emanuele Coccia
‘I have in me the vestiges of an endless series of living beings, all born of other living beings.’
Cosmos
Tishani Doshi
‘Remember when we were / young and the end was a black hole at the edge of forever, / a million light years away.’
Clarity
Ruchir Joshi
‘I was close to my own father, which many people are not.’
Ruchir Joshi remembers his son.
Words for Woman
Susana Moreira Marques
‘What we need, now, is: Mrs Dalloway in London, but as an immigrant’
How much faith can we place in coronavirus antibody tests?
Megan Price, Morgan Agnew & David Peters
Why is it so hard to roll out accurate antibody tests? Statisticians break down the challenges that come with testing for coronavirus immunity.
In Conversation
Saskia Vogel & Jen Calleja
‘Narrative is control, dominance, purposeful withholding, flirting’
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.’
