D.T. Max on about why ‘David always wanted to be one David’, the solace he found in twelve-step programmes and what his use of wiper-fluid, on a car ride with Jonathan Franzen, reveals about his prose style.
‘It’s no good joining an existing cult, you have to start one yourself.’
A short story by Japanese author Sayaka Murata, translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori, who also brought us Convenience Store Woman and Earthlings.
‘The oysters were her idea, a way of catching me off guard. I accidentally said yes.’
A story by Amy Silverberg.
‘I often had head lice as a child.’
Memoir by A.K. Blakemore, author of The Manningtree Witches.
‘I was trying simultaneously to numb the grief I felt and to burrow into that grief, so I could stand in it.’
On love, its absence and Joni Mitchell’s Blue album.
‘I want the poem to destroy time. / What are the ceremonies of forgetting?’
Nick Laird’s elegy for his father, Alastair Laird, who died of Covid-19.
‘My life unfolded within the net effect of my father’s choices.’
Memoir by Emmanuel Iduma.
Juliet Jacques on writing her trans and non-binary characters into being.
Poet Oli Hazzard on writing his debut novel Lorem Ipsum, which is made up of one single 50,000-word sentence.
Kjersti A. Skomsvold on writing The Child, a book on motherhood and grief.
’Early one morning in the fall of 1999, Steven R., a forty-seven-year-old man with fair skin and grey hair, was in the front yard of his home in suburban Nebraska, picking up leaves‘.
