‘The effeteness of a small number of King's students was fascinating to me at first, then repellent, and before long completely uninteresting. They dressed in peculiar clothes, talked in silly voices and appeared to me to be living caricatures of the human race. At times I longed for some familiar ordinariness and found it with boys from other colleges who introduced me to football and pool and pubs.’
My relationship with the other three girls can best be defined in negative terms. From my point of view, it is only now that our lack of common interest can be partially explained and to some degree lamented. But surely it’s better to admit that than to beatify ourselves or glorify that time, as s…
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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.
‘The only thing that was clear was that the square would be full, and Opantish had to be ready.’
An excerpt from Yasmin El-Rifae’s account of the Egyptian revolution and its aftermath, Radius.
‘By the time I was in my teens, I had taken up an existence framed by a double negative: not male, not white.’
An excerpt from Tsitsi Dangarembga’s essay collection, Black and Female.
‘It is easy, when we are young, to have ideals and to live according to them.’
An excerpt from Guadalupe Nettel’s Still Born.
‘Trouble was awake – we didn’t need anyone to tell us.’
New fiction by Adachioma Ezeano.
‘It was already dusk, a conspicuously symbolic black cloud was rising in the east, lit from the opposite direction by the orange and gold rays of the sun wreathed in a Technicolor sunset.’
