I was born in Oxford in 1973 and lived there for ten years. The memories of this time are fractured. I remember a party in the street for the Queen’s Jubilee: my father, Rick, dressed up as a ringmaster, my sister Emma on her horse, carnival lions in a home-made parade. I was always in the garden….
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‘The anglophone world, we have to infer, has run out of words for its own feelings.’
Daisy Hildyard on the wisdom of scarecrows.
‘What is the read receipt for?’
Lillian Fishman on texting, power and the ethics of leaving a friend on read.
‘Like pretty much everyone who uses the internet, I have seen many terrible things that I did not search for and that I cannot unsee.’
Rosanna McLaughlin on what the internet thinks she wants.
‘I have a pathological addiction to the internet, which I indulge with the excuse of making art. It rarely translates to anything good and mostly leaves me overstimulated and afraid.’
Paul Dalla Rosa on excess and the internet.
‘rumors of bees on speedwell, / no oxidative stress just / effortless pollination’
Two poems by Sylvia Legris.
‘Every time I tried to write more, it turned out to be a fruitless endeavor – I felt like I was trapped in a sealed room with no windows.’
Fiction by Yu Hua, translated by Michael Berry.
‘There was very little I could do in life except get dressed, smoke the correct cigarettes.’
An extract from Nothing Special by Nicole Flattery.
‘I used to be ashamed of it, though I’m not sure what exactly felt shameful.’
On training to be an opera singer.
‘Maud tries to understand how her role is being rewritten on the spot – who the woman might be.’
‘They learned that some people are born luckier than others and that things in this world do not always go as you plan.’
‘All good stories are both resonant and concrete; they live in the mind of the reader and reverberate beyond the pages of the book.’
