This is an excerpt from Seek You: A Journey Through American Loneliness by Kristen Radkte, out with Pantheon Books.
An excerpt from Seek You: A Journey Through American Loneliness, a new graphic novel by Kristen Radtke.
This is an excerpt from Seek You: A Journey Through American Loneliness by Kristen Radkte, out with Pantheon Books.
‘Feelings can be very obscure but numbers never lie.’
Kevin Brazil on metrics, obsession and fitness.
‘An intense workout is an ecstasy of punishment packaged as self-improvement.’
Mary Wellesley on exercise, ritual and Barry’s Bootcamp.
‘I was not good at sports because I would not do sports because I did not have the body for sports because I would not do sports.’
Saba Sams on girlhood, embodiment and avoiding sports.
‘Following United rarely brings me any great joy and most often it depresses me. If I could disengage, I would.’
Jonny Thakkar on Manchester United.
‘I deployed my body against an opponent like a blunt and effective instrument.’
John Patrick McHugh on playing Gaelic football.
Kristen Radtke is the author of the graphic nonfiction book Imagine Wanting Only This (2017), and Seek You: A Journey Through American Loneliness (2021), both with Pantheon. She is the art director and deputy publisher of The Believer magazine.
More about the author →
‘It would be wrong to say she hasn’t experienced life. Instead, it would be more apt to describe her as someone whom time has slipped by without leaving the slightest trace.’
Fiction by Wang Anyi, translated by Michael Berry.
‘How would I feel if I had messaged for years with someone that I later found out was an AI?’
Brea Souders speaks to Alice Zoo about chatbots, interconnection and the dialogue between photography and text in her work.
‘They queue up to pass, lap / like waves beside her, to receive the darshan / from her one, black eye.’
Poetry by Phoebe Power.
‘I didn’t think she was happy; I thought she was in love, but I didn’t know what that told me, if it told me anything.’
Fiction by Jennifer Atkins.
‘There was to be an exhibition. There were lots of pictures like his, apparently – of waiters, pastry cooks, valets, bellboys.’
A story by Tom Crewe.
‘Grief has a warring logic; it always wants something impossible, something worse and something better.’
An extract from Biography of X by Catherine Lacey.
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