‘What year was it? We have chosen to believe it was 1811’.
What year was it? We have chosen to believe it was 1811. Therefore: in the autumn of 1811, Alexandre Hemon got up from his slothful bed in Quimper, Brittany; sold, unbeknownst to his widowed mother, their only horse–a perennially exhausted nag–for thirty silver coins; and joined, after some adve…
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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.
‘Do writers of fiction have to create a cosmology in order to exist?’
‘I came to this fine country from Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, in the winter of 1992, a couple of months before the war started.’
Aleksandar Hemon and Stuart Dybek on the energy and inspiration of Chicago, its exhilirating ‘incompleteness’, and the ‘unique perspectives of seeing the city’.
‘My grandmother was not my grandmother.’
‘It was an isolated incident, and there had been no official or unofficial communication about it.’
