'I let the tears roll down to the sides of my mouth, and licked them to harden my insides. I wanted to cry gushingly, but I couldn't.'
My mother was the one who told me he was dead. I ran into the bathroom and bolted the door. There was a small window in there with two round jail-house bars. I held on to them hard. I was only ten. I let the tears roll down to the sides of my mouth, and licked them to harden my insides. I wanted to …
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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.
‘Identity, it seemed, was not so self-determined after all.’
‘It is to Shakespeare’s pages I return whenever I feel I am sinking. There I can be sure to find a lifeline.’
‘You have to go on the offensive until you smell victory. Then you have the aphrodisiac and can go full tilt.’
‘The past has never been as present as it is now in the world. But at the same time, all over the world, the determination to manipulate what we know has also never been stronger.’
‘In 1956, my father was thirty-nine years old. He didn't even know how to boil an egg.’
‘I always felt this way whenever a fresh stone grew inside me.’ A story by Maru Ayase, translated from the Japanese by Haydn Trowell.
