‘I paid only one visit to the Jewish cemetery before the war, sometime in the spring of 1939. I was twelve years old.’
One day late last summer I took a walk in Warsaw’s Jewish Cemetery. It is a bleak place, with narrow paths winding their way between the gravestones, some of them still standing, others lying on the ground, defaced, overgrown by weeds. I am not partial to cemeteries, but I have come back to this o…
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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.
‘He was our younger sister’s baby – her and her husband’s baby, I guess. They were young parents and excessively chill.’
Memoir by Emma Cline.
‘Why can’t the heart keep still and why isn’t the brain smooth to the touch.’
An excerpt from Ariana Harwicz’s novel Tender.
Kjersti A. Skomsvold on writing The Child, a book on motherhood and grief.
Translated from the Norwegian by Martin Aitken, an excerpt from The Child by Kjersti A. Skomsvold.
‘In the nineteenth century, Charles Baudelaire wrote of Paris being haunted by its past, by ‘ghosts in daylight.’
