On the way to the cricket fight, Mr Wu slipped us a piece of paper. It looked like a shopping list. ‘More numbers,’ said Michael, my translator. He read:
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‘We meet at various points in the great swathes of the past that neither of us were alive to witness.’
Allen Bratton on a daytrip to a castle with his older boyfriend.
‘Listening to three white poets, whom I suspect are academics, talk about the state of poetry.’
Oluwaseun Olayiwola eavesdrops on an older generation.
‘I’d been dubious about his company at first.’
Sarah Moss on watching Shakespeare with her twelve-year-old son.
‘She didn’t trust us because, to her, tenants were like children.’
Kate Zambreno on negotiating with her older landlady.
‘A moment now swallowed in embarrassment, I asked a question only a young person might ask an older one.’
Lynne Tillman on trying to understand what makes a generation.
‘A should probably write that it hit uz like a smack in the guts, or the red mist cem down or sumet like that, but in all honesty, a can just remember feelen upset.’
New fiction by Shaun Wilson.
‘Winning, it turns out, was the cracking whip that meant gamblers had to stay where they were until they lost their money all over again.’
Marina Benjamin on losing.
‘Before chintziness there was chintz, a fabric produced in India and imported to Europe by colonial traders.’
Sam Johnson-Schlee on what chintz means.
‘We claimed the places that were theirs and they were forced to take refuge on what we left behind.’
An excerpt from In Search of One Last Song.
‘Katherine Mansfield has just stolen my chance to begin a conversation.’
Fiction by Eudris Planche Savón, translated by Margaret Jull Costa.
