Artwork © Hannah Whitaker, Barcroft (Taeuber-Arp), 2014
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‘At the desk they said they encouraged guests not to walk, but she was determined’
Artwork © Hannah Whitaker, Barcroft (Taeuber-Arp), 2014
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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.
Deb Olin Unferth is the author of the story collection Minor Robberies, the novel Vacation and the memoir Revolution. Her work has been published in the New York Times, Harper’s, the Paris Review and Granta.
More about the author →She had already imagined it all, so much so that when she finally did see him, she felt unable to speak.
‘On the day the doctors extracted the eggs from her ovaries, he would have to go into a room in the hospital and produce.’
Fiction by Benjamin Nugent.
‘Lu Dong is a fifth-rate actor – that’s by his own ranking system.’
Fiction by Shuang Xuetao, translated by Jeremy Tiang.
‘Ordinary sounds change their meaning in the context of war when the reverberations of sound can mean death.’
Ada Wordsworth on silence, noise and the war in Ukraine.
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