‘To keep her eye on the cost, our mother set the clockwork oven-timer ticking when she picked up the phone.’
My father drowned when I was five years old. A picture of me, framed in gold plastic, was fished from his pocket and returned to my mother with a soggy wallet and a bunch of keys. The keys were to our new terraced house, now paid for with his life insurance.
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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.
‘It was by necessity, not choice.’
Ralf Webb on returning to the West Country.
‘Sometimes, in the shower, he finds new and surprising bruises, whose origin he can’t place.’
A story by Niamh Donnelly.
‘Refusal is the last recourse of the powerless.’
Marina Benjamin on her years of not eating, and not growing.
‘Black was thrown / in all directions.’
‘Even when I travel as far as India, you are with me and I am re-entering our cellar.’
Memoir by the poet Pascale Petit.
‘It seems necessary to say at the outset that I find the English novel a problematic entity, difficult to be properly sensible about.’
