‘Gao Xingjian, what have you never done that you would like to do?’
‘Music. Inside of me there is a rhythm. But it’s very complicated to make it real.’
Image © Hervé Simon
‘Gao Xingjian, what have you never done that you would like to do?’
‘Music. Inside of me there is a rhythm. But it’s very complicated to make it real.’
Image © Hervé Simon
‘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.
Gao Xingjian is a Chinese émigré and later French naturalised novelist, playwright, critic, painter, photographer, film director, and translator who in 2000 was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
More about the author →
‘I turn to O’Connor’s music when I get tired of lying to myself. Her songs are allegorical free-falls. Spiritual chiaroscuros, even.’
Momtaza Mehri on Sinéad O’Connor.
‘I lied about my age and I lied about my location and I lied about being horny.’
Fiction by Avigayl Sharp.
‘There can be any number of significant others in a life. Some we know for a long time; others are meteoric: we may see them only once.’
The editor introduces the issue.
‘Do they strike people as a strange couple? He does not know, does not care.’
Fiction by J.M. Coetzee.
‘Being recognised as part of a couple thrilled me; I felt legitimised. John had a life, a full life.’
Fiction by Sophie Collins.
‘In the early period the Jewish problem wasn't the main thing. What interested us in Austria was work and bread, freedom and an end to servitude.’
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