Once when I was sixteen I went down to North Avenue Beach to hook up with two West Side Hispanic girls I’d met at a rave. It was summer, I had a car, money from cutting lawns in my neighbourhood and three bottles of Boone’s Farm Strawberry Hill. The plan was to get the girls drunk, hook up with …
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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.
‘I don’t think much of the very silly, even gullible, person that I am.’
Fiction by Fleur Jaeggy, translated by Gini Alhadeff.
‘What does that mean, vegan cheese? asks a lady who’d had no query about amuse-bouche.’
An extract from The Alternatives by Caoilinn Hughes.
‘Fifty years I’ve played here, except for stretches in Arizona and Mississippi, after my divorce.’
Fiction by Kate Lister Campbell.
‘The people she longed to be understood by, the ones at whom her anxious hope was pinned, were her parents.’
Fiction by Vigdis Hjorth, translated by Charlotte Barslund.
‘A should probably write that it hit uz like a smack in the guts, or the red mist cem down or sumet like that, but in all honesty, a can just remember feelen upset.’
New fiction by Shaun Wilson.
‘They so wanted to be the grown-ups still.’
An excerpt from Anna Beecher’s debut novel, shortlisted for the Sunday Times Young Writer Award 2021.
