‘Love is like trash: it's not something you hoard, it's merely something you don't waste, like heat, or water, or paper’.
Someone told me they were more careful in England. He said they were more careful in Europe actually, because of all the wars. He said as a result of centuries of conflict they had less to spare over there, less to waste, and so, dutifully, but not, like the environmentalists in the States, piously,…
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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.
‘We decided then to tell each other exactly how a typical fuck played out in our marriages. We couldn’t believe we’d never done this before.’
Fiction by Miranda July.
‘What does that mean, vegan cheese? asks a lady who’d had no query about amuse-bouche.’
An extract from The Alternatives by Caoilinn Hughes.
‘It’s true that public sex and cruising can be complicated, but I still believe in the solidarity that a look can forge between people.’
Amelia Abraham and Jack Parlett discuss cruising, nostalgia and the privatisation of public sex.
‘How far can one deviate from the accepted pieties before one is kicked out?’
Brandon Taylor on naturalism and the future of fiction.
‘If all things were equal, what were we even doing here? Why weren’t we lying on our living-room floors, watching the dance of the dust, today and every day?’
Memoir by Noreen Masud.
Swedish poet and psychoanalyst Ulf Karl Olov Nilsson on trauma, silence and linguistic analysis of asylum seekers. Translated from the Swedish by Peter Graves.
