‘In Vienna I visited none of the sights and spoke not a word to a soul’.
In October 1980 I travelled from England, where I had then been living for nearly twenty-five years in a county which was almost always under grey skies, to Vienna, hoping that a change of place would help me get over a particularly difficult period in my life. In Vienna, however, I found that the d…
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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.
‘The eye wants to see its fill, the I wants to see how it feels.’
Saskia Vogel on the foundational stories of pornography.
‘In the middle of disaster, we made the unimaginable – joy.’
Roger Reeves on loss, memory and the legacy of slavery.
‘Rosella and her co-creators curate an archive of pain, of endurance, of love and belonging, of alienation and disconnection.’
Nicole R. Fleetwood introduces the photography of Raphaela Rosella.
‘It’s a story that happens to you once and then lives with you forever.’
An excerpt from Vagabonds! by Eloghosa Osunde.
‘Only as I watched the little tugboat disappear towards IJmuiden, just west of Amsterdam, did I begin to have doubts about what had been proposed to me.’
