‘She could see, or was starting to, that someone out there was seeing him, watching him.’
When George’s father died, he neglected to tell his therapist, which wouldn’t have been such a big deal, except she could cop a mood, and she knew how to punish him with a vicious show of boredom.
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‘I think there should be a National Service of Hospitality. The best way to see the true face of humanity is to serve it a plate of chips.’
Camilla Grudova on bad-mannered customers.
‘Anyone who has ever worked night shifts will understand the vertiginous feeling that comes with staring down the day from the wrong end.’
A.K. Blakemore on working nights.
‘I was constantly reading job ads, trying to find my holy grail – a job I could stand to do, and someone foolish enough to hire me.’
Sandra Newman on learning how to play professional blackjack.
‘I loved being a receptionist. What I loved about it was playing the part of being a receptionist.’
Emily Berry on being a temporary office worker.
‘Every part of you would swell, including your eyeballs, and no matter how much water you drank, you were always dehydrated.’
Junot Díaz on working for a steel mill.
‘One purpose of art is to get us to wake up, recalibrate our emotional life, get ourselves into proper relation to reality.’
‘The tally, indeed, on that particular activity, in that particular location – or, in fact, on any couch ever – was, indeed, zero.’
‘She kneels on the floor and takes it in her mouth again. He’s looking at the top of her head, at the roots of her hair where the blonde, he now sees, is slightly mixed with grey.’
Fiction by David Szalay.
‘They started out as fraternities, the cults. Poorer students wanted strong networks, like the ones boarding school pupils had already.’
Fiction by Toye Oladinni.
‘I promise you, the committee only looks at two things: how feasible a proposal is, and what it could actually do for the environment.’
A bureaucrat and an entrepreneur discuss environment-saving proposals in a short play by Si’an Chen, translated by Jeremy Tiang.
‘The danger with chasing fantasies is that the reality is often so different than the imagination.’
