‘Pronto?’ I lift the phone in our bedroom.


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‘My last glimpse of Paolo was on the platform at Verona station when I pointed him out to the police.’
‘Pronto?’ I lift the phone in our bedroom.
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‘The slutty ingenuity of vegetables when it comes to desire and reproductive methods is a marvel.’
Rebecca May Johnson negotiates allotment culture.
‘Globalisation is incomplete: money can go anywhere, but laws cannot.’
Oliver Bullough on one of Britain’s most contested outposts: the British Virgin Islands.
‘You discover during your very first lessons that the problem of singing better involves overcoming many other problems you had not ever imagined.’
A new story from Lydia Davis.
‘She began to count; it was easier this way, counting, because she would not have to remember how she felt.’
An excerpt from Ukamaka Olisakwe’s Ogadinma.
‘Like any desert, I learn myself by what’s desired of me—
and I am demoned by those desires.’
From Postcolonial Love Poem by Natalie Diaz.
Tim Parks was born in Manchester and moved to Italy in 1981. He is the author of five non-fiction accounts of life in northern Italy, most recently A Literary Tour of Italy, and sixteen novels. He has translated the work of, among others, Alberto Moravia and Italo Calvino and writes for the New York Review of Books blog. Painting Death, his latest novel, is published by Harvill Secker.
More about the author →‘It was explained to me that in Italy a formality is a sort of dormant volcano.’
‘He was long and white; his hands especially were long and white, and he sewed; he looked after the linen; he worked as a woman would; he lived in the house; he didn’t speak, he was rarely spoken to.’
Translated from the French by Stephanie Smee.
‘Once, early on, before he learned such things were never said, my brother approached a white boy in his class with my mother’s maiden name and said they must be cousins. The violence in my family’s home started a year or so later.’
Caleb Klaces on being inspired by Van Gogh’s third image, found during the X-ray scanning of one of Van Gogh’s early, repainted canvases.
‘She fired the speargun, then held up the spear with an octopus writhing on it. It was a mottled pinky-brown and its head was about as big as two clasped hands.’
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