Jesse Ball and Josie Mitchell discuss the process of writing about different worlds, the fraudulence of speech, and why Jesse named his pet dog Goose.
‘Confusion is the only natural response to the world, the alternative would be to just fall in with everyone else’s plans.’
Jesse Ball and Josie Mitchell discuss the process of writing about different worlds, the fraudulence of speech, and why Jesse named his pet dog Goose.
‘The slutty ingenuity of vegetables when it comes to desire and reproductive methods is a marvel.’
Rebecca May Johnson negotiates allotment culture.
‘Globalisation is incomplete: money can go anywhere, but laws cannot.’
Oliver Bullough on one of Britain’s most contested outposts: the British Virgin Islands.
‘You discover during your very first lessons that the problem of singing better involves overcoming many other problems you had not ever imagined.’
A new story from Lydia Davis.
‘She began to count; it was easier this way, counting, because she would not have to remember how she felt.’
An excerpt from Ukamaka Olisakwe’s Ogadinma.
‘Like any desert, I learn myself by what’s desired of me—
and I am demoned by those desires.’
From Postcolonial Love Poem by Natalie Diaz.
Jesse Ball is the award-winning author of over ten books of prose, poetry, drawings and essays. He lives in Chicago.
More about the author →Josie Mitchell is an editor at Granta magazine, and writes elsewhere on books.
More about the author →‘When I was 4 or 5 I sent the Queen of England drawings of monsters.’
‘People love to say it to you like it counts: Oh, Lucia, she will live on in your memory.’
‘My friends, what I mean is, this life is shallow like a plate. It goes no further.’
‘You are learning – learning a great deal. It is too much for you, so your body bows out. Then you wake up and you can continue.’
‘It’s like taking an escalator trip into someone else’s mind for an hour, finding nothing of actual substance up there, and realising, as you retreat mournfully back into your own skull, that there’s nothing there, either.’
An extract from Adam Weymouth’s Kings of the Yukon, winner of the Sunday Times / Peters Fraser + Dunlop Young Writer of the Year Award in association with the University of Warwick
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