The General Mills factory, Chicago, 1949


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‘I grew up in a factory town, Aurora, Illinois, some forty miles west of Chicago.’
The General Mills factory, Chicago, 1949
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‘I didn’t think she was happy; I thought she was in love, but I didn’t know what that told me, if it told me anything.’
Fiction by Jennifer Atkins.
‘She has been ten for a month and she does not like it. She carries the weight of her extra digit like a chain-mail vest.’
Fiction by Sara Baume.
‘I could hear the sea, and I could hear my own name.’
Fiction by Eliza Clark.
‘There was to be an exhibition. There were lots of pictures like his, apparently – of waiters, pastry cooks, valets, bellboys.’
A story by Tom Crewe.
‘I don’t remember his face, nor him as a whole.’
Derek Owusu on fathers and family.
Thom Jones is the author of the short-story collections The Pugilist At Rest, The Cold Snap and Sonny Liston was a Friend of Mine (Faber/Little, Brown).
More about the author →‘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.’
A short story by Jianan Qian on stray dogs, desperation and re-education in rural China during the Cultural Revolution.
‘In the year leading up to this I started collecting objects that, in some way, evoked a sense of Canadianness in me.’
‘She’s a good-for-nothing chummer. If she survives a week on the slime line without cutting off her thumb or slicing her wrist, she’s hired.’
‘Where wealth and technology go, culture quickly follows, and soon it became acceptable, even desirable, to express an interest in Japan beyond the mere practicality offered by its products.’
‘Early one morning in July 2003 I was woken by a phone call from a young man who I’d known since he was twelve.’
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