Khalid with his brother Mohamed
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‘Early one morning in July 2003 I was woken by a phone call from a young man who I’d known since he was twelve.’
Khalid with his brother Mohamed
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‘Feelings can be very obscure but numbers never lie.’
Kevin Brazil on metrics, obsession and fitness.
‘An intense workout is an ecstasy of punishment packaged as self-improvement.’
Mary Wellesley on exercise, ritual and Barry’s Bootcamp.
‘I was not good at sports because I would not do sports because I did not have the body for sports because I would not do sports.’
Saba Sams on girlhood, embodiment and avoiding sports.
‘Following United rarely brings me any great joy and most often it depresses me. If I could disengage, I would.’
Jonny Thakkar on Manchester United.
‘I deployed my body against an opponent like a blunt and effective instrument.’
John Patrick McHugh on playing Gaelic football.
Alex Kotlowitz’s books include There Are No Children Here and, most recently, Chicago: Never a City So Real (Crown). He teaches writing at Northwestern University.
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‘If it has ever fallen to you to scatter someone’s ashes, especially those of someone you loved, you might share my sense of the process as tantamount to fly tipping, the stuff resembling nothing so much as cat litter.’
William Atkins on disposing of the dead.
‘My father said there is fate and destiny governing each of our paths, of individuals and of nations, and this only the dead may know.’
Aube Rey Lescure on returning to China.
‘Naturally, no partnership is perfect. Certain pieces will be at odds – you’ll have that.’
Fiction by Nico Walker.
‘When you are a female this is what happens: if you are not selected to be a mate by age twenty-seven, you are asked to get on the bus.’
Fiction by Sophie Frances Kemp.
‘He takes the knife, cuts the barb from the body, sends it back to the depths of the river.’
An extract from Not a River by Selva Almada, translated by Annie McDermott.
‘The point of lucid death,’ he said, ‘is to retain the consciousness of dying, while blunting the agony of it.’
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