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‘It was a harsh and brutal puberty: the tiny creatures began to fret, as if an inner sense had forewarned them of the torment in store’
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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.
Primo Levi (1919–1987) was an Italian writer and chemist. In 1944 he was deported to Auschwitz, an experience he addressed in the memoir If This Is a Man and the essay collection The Drowned and the Saved, as well as in other works. His story collection The Periodic Table was named by the Royal Institution of Great Britain as the best science book ever.
More about the author →Simon Rees is a librettist, writer and translator working from Italian, French and German. His novels include The Devil’s Looking-Glass, Nathaniel and Mrs Palmer and Making a Snowman. He was dramaturg at the Welsh National Opera from 1989 to 2012, and has also written operas, poetry collections, plays, lyrics and librettos.
More about the translator →‘What I would like to experience most of all would be to find myself freed, even if only for a moment, from the weight of my body.’ Primo Levi on floating.
‘I had not aimed for literary celebrity, and I felt at ease with myself for having done my civic duty as a witness, and felt relieved of the burden of slavery.’
‘Today Kaenunu is largely deserted. On Mahui, on the other hand, it is not unusual for anyone with patience and good vision to catch sight of some atoula.’
‘He'd have to keep an eye on his liver now, the way you do with cars, if you want them to last: regular washing and greasing, an eye cast over the electrics, the injectors, all the pumps, the battery and the brakes.’
‘Life is full of customs whose roots can no longer be traced ... but in any event, why were pig's feet obligatory with lentils, and cheese on macaroni?’
‘Influences imprint themselves on our consciousness as light does a photograph, or trauma the psyche’
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