‘Always and everywhere, this unequal struggle to preserve and remember.’
One afternoon in the autumn of 1933 the writer J. B. Priestley drove north from Manchester towards Preston and Blackpool. Priestley was then England’s most successful young novelist. Not yet forty, with five novels and the international success of The Good Companions behind him, he had decided as …
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‘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.
‘Feelings of hate and despair dwindle as they pass down the generations.’
‘Generalisations about the national psyche – supposing there is one – must always be treated with suspicion.’
‘It was a peculiar, alopecic landscape of hummocks and gullies, with patches of grass growing on what looked like white earth, and rarely a soul to be seen.’
‘The lust of an old man is disgusting but the lust of an old woman is worse. Everyone knows that.’
