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The Rat Snipers

Ben Lasman

‘When they stand on their hind legs, arms up, wrists limp, rats can take on a beguiling sort of personhood.’

After

April Ayers Lawson

‘I again told him I wasn’t ready to have sex, and his only response was to lean in and kiss me. The hallway in which we walked seemed to be shrinking, closing in on us.’ – April Ayers Lawson on intimacy after sexual abuse.

The Trouble With Rape

April Ayers Lawson

April Ayers Lawson on rape, trauma, and the difficulty of speaking out about sexual abuse.

Abuse, Silence, and the Light That Virginia Woolf Switched On

April Ayers Lawson

When Virginia Woolf was thirteen, she was abused by her half-brother George Duckworth. No one believed her - not even her biographers. April Ayers Lawson on Woolf's abuse, and her own.

Terrors

Kiese Laymon

An excerpt from Heavy: An American Memoir by Kiese Laymon

The Swimmer

Tom Lee

‘I wondered what an onlooker might make of this man, this scene.’

En Route to The Promised Land

Ken Light

Ken Light revisits the photos he took of immigrants crossing the border between Mexico and the US in the 1980s.

There Is No Light of the World But the World

Tim Lilburn

‘The mountain rises and sleeps backward / into a cloud-captured sun’

No Machine Could Do It

Eugene Lim

‘In the future we have to be as interesting to the AI as our pets are to us.’

Dividing Lines

Jack Losh

Jack Losh reports from rebel-held Bria in the Central African Republic, where fighting has forced thousands into a displacement camp.

A Not-So-Pretty History of Pet Care

Daniel Magariel

‘One day after the next I would figure out what was needed, learn from my mistakes, pay attention to what worked.’

Heart Berries

Terese Marie Mailhot

‘We started the affair in a small booth at Village Inn. I didn’t sleep the night before. You were my teacher, and we discussed my fiction.’

Fathers and Sons

Benjamin Markovits

‘For a while it wasn’t clear how good he would become, and then it was. He went up the rankings, stopped, and started going down.’