‘Please, I beg you. If I do not buy lederhosen now, I will never buy lederhosen.’
‘Mother dumped my father,’ a friend of my wife was saying one day, ‘all because of a pair of shorts.’
I had to ask. ‘A pair of shorts?’
‘I know it sounds strange,’ she said, ‘because it is a strange story.’
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‘We meet at various points in the great swathes of the past that neither of us were alive to witness.’
Allen Bratton on a daytrip to a castle with his older boyfriend.
‘Listening to three white poets, whom I suspect are academics, talk about the state of poetry.’
Oluwaseun Olayiwola eavesdrops on an older generation.
‘I’d been dubious about his company at first.’
Sarah Moss on watching Shakespeare with her twelve-year-old son.
‘She didn’t trust us because, to her, tenants were like children.’
Kate Zambreno on negotiating with her older landlady.
‘A moment now swallowed in embarrassment, I asked a question only a young person might ask an older one.’
Lynne Tillman on trying to understand what makes a generation.
‘That was the setup for the review I wrote about this imaginary record.’ Translated from the Japanese by Philip Gabriel.
‘What I’m talking about is a different sea, and different mountains.’ Haruki Murakami walks to his hometown after the Great Hanshin earthquake of 1995.
‘I looked up at the sky. A few grey cotton chunks of cloud hung there, motionless.’
‘How far can one deviate from the accepted pieties before one is kicked out?’
Brandon Taylor on naturalism and the future of fiction.
‘The coronavirus seemed to demand immediate responses to the questions we’d been struggling with for years.’
