‘Your issue A Literature for Politics is extraordinary, piece by piece and as a whole.’
‘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.
‘Something slightly odd united us at times: a form of cruelty.’
Fiction by Anne Serre, translated by Mark Hutchinson.
‘you dreamt of the CUNY / Graduate Center library / on fire, you dove in to save Stalin’s / copy of Capital’
Poetry by Kay Gabriel.
‘He saw himself as nothing more than a man holding a pen.’
Paula Fourie remembers her husband, Athol Fugard.
‘The material becomes a fable about Los Angeles, a city that is always watching itself watch itself.’
Jesse Barron on Los Angeles and Gary Indiana’s final novel.
‘Dead friends come to us unbidden – in unexpected moments, in dreams. They remain in conversation. In these pages, writers have transmitted the flickering aura of their departed friends.’
The editor introduces the issue.
‘Uncle Donald the boffin, Uncle Cecil the pharmacist, Uncle Edgar the optician and Uncle Edgar the boho restaurateur’
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