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Introduction: On Staying at Home

William Atkins

‘If the following pieces can be said to have an overriding characteristic, it is that they take seriously the experience of being a stranger.’

Guest editor William Atkins introduces the issue.

On Mistaking Whales

Bathsheba Demuth

‘The people who lived here lived in the heads of whales.’

A historian from New England goes to the Bering Strait.

Graffiti Mobili

Jennifer Croft

‘The picture of a postcard is a geograft, a scion of a place thrust into the life of a resident of somewhere else.’

Jennifer Croft on graffiti and the history of the postcard.

Primitive Child

Jason Allen-Paisant

‘My roots seemed to be in the ocean; the ocean being symbolic of my absent father.’

Memoir by Jason Allen-Paisant.

From the Center of the World to the End of the World

Eliane Brum

‘For tourists to have this “experience”, six scientists were obliged to interrupt their research and wait until that afternoon, when the weather turned and time in the field shrank.’

Translated from the Portuguese by Diane Grosklaus Whitty.

Notes on Craft

Lucie Elven

‘I make a list of accidents – sentences I’ve misread with my misreading left in them.’

Larger than an Orange

Lucy Burns

An excerpt from Larger than an Orange, a book by Lucy Burns about abortion.

Notes on Craft

Lauren Elkin

On journal keepers, from Sei Shōnagon to Susan Sontag.

Chase Scene

Dodie Bellamy

Dodie Bellamy remembers her partner, the poet Kevin Killian.

A Burning Bird

O Thiam Chin

On intimacy and national service.

A Series of Rooms Occupied by Ghislaine Maxwell

Chris Dennis

‘What is the metaphor of the room? Of the house. Of the neighborhood.’

Chris Dennis on incarceration.

Tell It Slant

Hilton Als

On Renata Adler’s Speedboat.

Breast or Tooth?

Tishani Doshi

‘A breast just casually hanging around, being a functional exocrine gland, enjoying the sun? Impossible.’

Tishani Doshi on women’s rights in India.

On ‘Colville’

Natalie Diaz

The author of Postcolonial Love Poem on ‘Colville’, the photoessay by Fergus Thomas.