‘What would I give / to be one of those swimmers in all this snow, / swallowed by the cold and the night’s strange radiance?’
Midnight, early February. Moonlight, trapped
between the snow still falling and the white earth,
is luminous from our sloped roof to the firs
that edge the common land. In the white curve
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Doctors, solitude and the stones within us – for fiction about isolation, it has to be Haruki Murakami. Translated from the Japanese by Jay Rubin.
‘Things have changed without seeking permission.’ A plague diary of this March, by Gonçalo M. Tavares, translated from the Portuguese by Daniel Hahn.
‘Our view of the morning’s entertainment was restricted by the width of the door frame.’ Bruce Chatwin writes about his imprisonment during a coup in Benin.
‘A leech bodes this: you will, sooner or later, overflow yourself. ’ Rebecca Giggs on leeches and the borders of the human body.
‘Her eyes fluttered open and I felt like I was at the edge of the mouth of a cave, with every intention of jumping in.’ For pure escapism, lose yourself in the nineteenth-century Paris of Carmen Maria Machado.
Two poems by Fiona Benson, whose Vertigo & Ghost is shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize 2020.
‘days I talked with Zeus / I ate only ice / felt the blood trouble and burn / under my skin’
‘I’ve always wanted to write from the gut, to write instinctively rather than cerebrally.’
‘I head down the path hoping she’ll come / but when I look back she’s gone and my own voice / snags at her name like barbed wire on skin.’
‘It makes no difference / If the devil has been defeated or if it is your character’
‘Unlike the other comic strips in the magazine, ‘The Adventures of Mampato’ was conceived, illustrated, and entirely produced in Chile.’
