‘Hearing, they say, is the first of the senses we develop in the womb.’
Hearing, they say, is the first of the senses we develop in the womb. For a certain time, inside our mothers’ bodies, the entire universe is a soundscape, nothing else exists.
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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.
‘By the end of our journey together we had signally failed to understand each other, yet an unlikely, even unprecedented connection had formed.’
’Shortly after its publication in 1980 I was surprised to learn that I had written a travel book’.
‘My life as a writer depends on irony and metaphor, and my parents are horrified and alienated by both.’
Translated from the Italian by Elizabeth Harris.
‘It’s hard to find a spot where the colony hasn’t reached; the landscape is consistently interrupted.’
Dominic Guerrera introduces artwork by James Tylor.
Winner of the Commonwealth Writers Short Story Prize for the Pacific region.
