‘If they’re willing to do this for their country then I should be willing to make the same sacrifices.’
It’s close to midnight when I cross the Mississippi River at Saint Louis. The soaring stainless-steel Gateway Arch gleams in the skyline light.
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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.
An excerpt from Kevin Maxwell’s revelatory exposé about his experiences in the British police force.
‘The coronavirus seemed to demand immediate responses to the questions we’d been struggling with for years.’
‘Connections are being forged, even as we keep our distance. Let’s hold onto them in the after.’
Jessica Francis Kane on neighbourliness in the time of COVID-19.
‘You’re gonna want to go down the other side of the mountain and check out the Facility. Don’t do it.’
‘The first person he tells is his girlfriend of one year. I’m going to donate my hair to my mother, he says, and is worried to see tears rise in her eyes.’
‘Blood had started to come out from within, thick and dark blood that forced me to use sanitary pads every month.’
