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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‘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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‘The anglophone world, we have to infer, has run out of words for its own feelings.’
Daisy Hildyard on the wisdom of scarecrows.
‘What is the read receipt for?’
Lillian Fishman on texting, power and the ethics of leaving a friend on read.
‘Like pretty much everyone who uses the internet, I have seen many terrible things that I did not search for and that I cannot unsee.’
Rosanna McLaughlin on what the internet thinks she wants.
‘I have a pathological addiction to the internet, which I indulge with the excuse of making art. It rarely translates to anything good and mostly leaves me overstimulated and afraid.’
Paul Dalla Rosa on excess and the internet.
‘rumors of bees on speedwell, / no oxidative stress just / effortless pollination’
Two poems by Sylvia Legris.
Ben Marcus is the author of The Age of Wire and String, Notable American Women, The Flame Alphabet and Leaving the Sea. His work has appeared in the New Yorker, Granta, Harper's and the Paris Review. Marcus has received a Whiting Writers' Award, a Berlin Prize and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He is on the faculty at Columbia University in New York.
More about the author →‘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.’
‘The intensity of it seemed in retrospect something inexplicable, like a sudden opening in the sky with an outpouring of visions.’
Mary Gaitskill on her experiences with Pneuma therapy.
‘Desire charges the landscape with physical upheaval. We become water, weather. And why not? Why describe a character by the hat she is wearing instead of her experience of orgasm?’
Robert Glück and K Patrick on writing desire.
‘We decided then to tell each other exactly how a typical fuck played out in our marriages. We couldn’t believe we’d never done this before.’
Fiction by Miranda July.
‘I still have, somewhere at the back of my head, the notion that there are real poets out there and that all the rest of us are just pretending.’
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