‘If he fell in I would jump straight after, I would plumb through water not cold so much as oily, and dark as a dirty wine bottle.’
Kiddio was between shoe sizes when we went to my cousin’s wedding in a superannuated church that smelled of cooked dust. All day he tottered like a sandpiper to cope with his Pumas’ constriction. Before we lit out for the journey he walloped my hand away when I tried to slacken his laces, and th…
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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.
In this new series, we give authors a space to discuss the way they write – from technique and style to inspirations that inform their craft.
‘It’s the small stuff – and here I mean the odd particulate matter of daily life – that lets me access the sprawl of a place that wasn’t mine but has incrementally become so.’
Mary O’Donoghue on why Mavis Gallant‘s ‘Mlle. Dias de Corta’ is the best story of 1992.
‘I tried to work out how many elements I would have plugged if I retired at sixty, and soon I was fatigued before a simple subtraction.’
Fiction by A. Jiang.
‘As soon as I turned the corner, I saw her. She was swimming across the blue sea, the only person in the entire swimming pool.’
Fiction by Yang Zhihan, translated by Helen Wang.
‘As every soldier and every journalist who has ever covered a war knows – sleeping and eating are the most important things.’
Lindsey Hilsum writes home from Ukraine.
