‘Maybe they're worried that their absence will be noticed. Maybe they just want to come home.’
America was my foreground, familiar and known: the crowds, the voices, Captain Kangaroo and Mr Magoo, the great, westbound trains that clattered and tilted past the crossing as my father and I sat waiting in the car on Orchard Road. Behind it, though, for as long as I can remember, was the Old World…
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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.
‘Every marriage is forged differently; some crack at a touch, others endure beyond belief, still others are tempered by events and time.’
‘It was in January, I think. That weekend, more than any other, the thought of her leaving seemed impossible.’
‘My Czech family’s house stands on a geopolitical rift: it occupies a place the political storms sweep through, uprooting everything that is settled.’
An essay by Anna Parker.
‘Only from a distance does the observer understand the object that remained an enigma from close up.’
Fiction by Deniz Utlu, translated by Jackie Smith.
‘Are you talking as Laleh now, or as the Islamic Republic of Iran? I don’t say anything.’
Fiction by Shida Bazyar, translated by Ruth Martin.
Nobel Peace Prize is awarded to human rights organisation Memorial.
