One day, not long after he turned thirteen, Adam ran away from home. He woke up that morning and decided he would look for his mother.
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One day, not long after he turned thirteen, Adam ran away from home. He woke up that morning and decided he would look for his mother.
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‘Feelings can be very obscure but numbers never lie.’
Kevin Brazil on metrics, obsession and fitness.
‘An intense workout is an ecstasy of punishment packaged as self-improvement.’
Mary Wellesley on exercise, ritual and Barry’s Bootcamp.
‘I was not good at sports because I would not do sports because I did not have the body for sports because I would not do sports.’
Saba Sams on girlhood, embodiment and avoiding sports.
‘Following United rarely brings me any great joy and most often it depresses me. If I could disengage, I would.’
Jonny Thakkar on Manchester United.
‘I deployed my body against an opponent like a blunt and effective instrument.’
John Patrick McHugh on playing Gaelic football.
Tash Aw is the author of four critically acclaimed novels, which have won the Whitbread First Novel Award, a regional Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and twice been longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. He is also the author of the memoir The Face: Strangers on a Pier, which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. He was recently the Judith Ginsberg Fellow at the Columbia Institute of Ideas and Imagination in Paris. His latest novel, We, The Survivors, was published in 2019.
Photograph © Stacey Liu
‘We were trapped in a sort of double prison: by poverty in Europe, and by China and its expectations of us.’
‘Where wealth and technology go, culture quickly follows, and soon it became acceptable, even desirable, to express an interest in Japan beyond the mere practicality offered by its products.’
‘It was as if he was consciously trying to fashion an image for what he wanted the country to be: ultra-confident and unapologetic, not just severing all links with our colonial past but sticking a bold middle finger up to it while we strode chest-out into the future.’
‘I have no house, from time to time I dream of having one, not a holiday home but a house to bury myself in.’
Memoir by Yasmina Reza, translated by Alison L. Strayer.
‘I make a certain effort / to give my sister in Korea / the impression / that I am interested’
Poetry by Audun Mortensen.
‘I make a certain effort / to give my sister in Korea / the impression / that I am interested’
Poetry by Audun Mortensen.
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