‘My grandmother was not my grandmother.’
My grandmother was not my grandmother. I started referring to her as my grandmother only in the United States because I was too lazy to explain how she had come to mean what she meant to me. Other than a couple of years before her death, she spent her whole life in Bosnia, mostly in Sarajevo. Her na…
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‘We meet at various points in the great swathes of the past that neither of us were alive to witness.’
Allen Bratton on a daytrip to a castle with his older boyfriend.
‘Listening to three white poets, whom I suspect are academics, talk about the state of poetry.’
Oluwaseun Olayiwola eavesdrops on an older generation.
‘I’d been dubious about his company at first.’
Sarah Moss on watching Shakespeare with her twelve-year-old son.
‘She didn’t trust us because, to her, tenants were like children.’
Kate Zambreno on negotiating with her older landlady.
‘A moment now swallowed in embarrassment, I asked a question only a young person might ask an older one.’
Lynne Tillman on trying to understand what makes a generation.
‘I came to this fine country from Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, in the winter of 1992, a couple of months before the war started.’
‘Do writers of fiction have to create a cosmology in order to exist?’
Aleksandar Hemon and Stuart Dybek on the energy and inspiration of Chicago, its exhilirating ‘incompleteness’, and the ‘unique perspectives of seeing the city’.
‘What year was it? We have chosen to believe it was 1811’.
‘Yell defiance until his chest hurt, at the hawks that circled and circled over the meadow.’
