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First Love
Gwendoline Riley
‘It must be a dreadful cross: this hot desire to join in with people who don’t want you.’
I Used to Go for Long Walks in the Evenings
Stephen Sexton
‘My celebrity accumulated like a kidney stone: / children, pets, even some corvids recognised me’
The Hand’s Breadth Murders: Out-takes
Gus Palmer
‘You could look all over the world without finding traditions that have lasted as long as the ones here.’
Eel
Stefanie Seddon
‘The eel I saw was the one lying deep and quiet and alone in his coppery pool in the bush.’ 2016 Commonwealth Short Story Prize – regional winner for Europe and Canada.
Republicans
James Pogue
‘This American says he’s heard of Cross but that he’s still just passing through.’ He laughed and formed the shape of a pistol with his right hand. ‘Well you heard that part, didn’t ya? That is one thing that will never change here.’
Introduction
Sigrid Rausing
‘But Ireland is Ireland. It resists and relishes its own national images in equal measure.’
Mr Salary
Sally Rooney
‘My love for him felt so total and so annihilating that it was often impossible for me to see him clearly at all.’
All We Shall Know
Donal Ryan
‘Thoughts sharpen themselves on the flints of one another and pierce me like a knife in my middle, sunk deep and twisted around.’
A Visit to the Zoo
Colm Tóibín
‘The two chameleons in a glass case appeared to interest all of them, Heinrich thought, because of their beauty and their stillness. They looked like a pale painting.’
The Butcher
Stephen Sexton
‘Outside deer are nowhere to be seen and inside / the radio spectrum fills up with sorrowful little packets of data.’
On Shakespeare and Aemilia Lanyer
Sandra Simonds
‘I gently propose that for the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death we stop reading Shakespeare and shift our attention to the poems of Aemilia Lanyer’. Sandra Simonds on Shakespeare and Aemilia Lanyer.
