‘The world, we too often forget, has no investment or interest in the triumph of Homo sapiens’
By a stroke of good luck I inhabit a remarkable place, a wooded bench above the upper McKenzie, a whitewater river in western Oregon. It is country for which gentrification is still a long way off. On the other side of the river, the mountains carry old-growth forest steeply up to the sky—it is un…
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‘I think there should be a National Service of Hospitality. The best way to see the true face of humanity is to serve it a plate of chips.’
Camilla Grudova on bad-mannered customers.
‘Anyone who has ever worked night shifts will understand the vertiginous feeling that comes with staring down the day from the wrong end.’
A.K. Blakemore on working nights.
‘I was constantly reading job ads, trying to find my holy grail – a job I could stand to do, and someone foolish enough to hire me.’
Sandra Newman on learning how to play professional blackjack.
‘I loved being a receptionist. What I loved about it was playing the part of being a receptionist.’
Emily Berry on being a temporary office worker.
‘Every part of you would swell, including your eyeballs, and no matter how much water you drank, you were always dehydrated.’
Junot Díaz on working for a steel mill.
‘What we’re about to see is greater than the thing you’re running from.’
‘The effort to know a place deeply is, ultimately, an expression of the human desire to belong, to fit somewhere.’
‘Motherhood is this chapter, / we all love a mother, / disastrous as it is.’
Poetry by K Patrick.
‘“Dolphin safe” labels on our tins are reckoned among marine scientists to mean next to nothing.’
Katherine Rundell on tuna and extinction speculation.
‘create a national holiday in your namelessness, in my head.’
Poems from the author’s debut collection Quiet.
‘I don’t think much of the very silly, even gullible, person that I am.’
Fiction by Fleur Jaeggy, translated by Gini Alhadeff.
