‘Sarah Tisdall belongs to a generation which has inherited from us a world sewn thick with 50,000 nuclear warheads.’
Heinrich Böll’s novel, The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum, tells of a quite ordinary, decent young woman whose reputation was suddenly stripped from her by a tabloid newspaper. She, utterly incensed, shot the journalist who had defamed her.
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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.
‘The aim is to coax the writer out of the isolation which keeps one end of the publishing industry comfortably in the nineteenth century.’
‘I think people who ape the sentiments of others often go on to believe the thing they said. It becomes their opinion.’
Juliet Jacques and Iphgenia Baal discuss early digital cultures, precarity and social architecture.
‘How do we perform our politics, our outrage and our grievances when we are among a group?’
Anthony Anaxagorou talks about his collection Heritage Aesthetics.
‘By the time I was in my teens, I had taken up an existence framed by a double negative: not male, not white.’
An excerpt from Tsitsi Dangarembga’s essay collection, Black and Female.
‘Traditional hand-craft becomes literary practice; becomes critical theory.’
Preti Taneja on intertextuality.
‘It wasn’t an experiment so much as a response to the need to find a way to embody the oddly shaped story I wanted to tell.’
