There used to be a dairy outlet over on Reisterstown Road, with a lighted white glass sign outside reading first with the carriage trade. It showed the silhouette of a woman wheeling a baby carriage – a witticism, I guess – and she was just galloping along, taking huge confident strides in a dre…
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‘I think there should be a National Service of Hospitality. The best way to see the true face of humanity is to serve it a plate of chips.’
Camilla Grudova on bad-mannered customers.
‘Anyone who has ever worked night shifts will understand the vertiginous feeling that comes with staring down the day from the wrong end.’
A.K. Blakemore on working nights.
‘I was constantly reading job ads, trying to find my holy grail – a job I could stand to do, and someone foolish enough to hire me.’
Sandra Newman on learning how to play professional blackjack.
‘I loved being a receptionist. What I loved about it was playing the part of being a receptionist.’
Emily Berry on being a temporary office worker.
‘Every part of you would swell, including your eyeballs, and no matter how much water you drank, you were always dehydrated.’
Junot Díaz on working for a steel mill.
‘How far can one deviate from the accepted pieties before one is kicked out?’
Brandon Taylor on naturalism and the future of fiction.
‘He takes the knife, cuts the barb from the body, sends it back to the depths of the river.’
An extract from Not a River by Selva Almada, translated by Annie McDermott.
‘How can I accept a trauma or a loss that I cannot define?’
Rebecca May Johnson on pregnancy and divining the future.
‘The past is no longer behind me but in front.’
An extract from About Ed by Robert Glück.
‘I won her with my grief first / a mess of steaming entrails, enticing / with its gloss.’
Two poems by Madeleine Stack.
‘I went to Glasgow to live out a fantasy. Its fluid, inconstant, nerve-wrung landscape had a claim upon my imagination.’
