‘I stood in front of the roller coaster, whose winding tracks looked like intestines in a demon's stomach.’
Two thousand and four, the year of the monkey, my zodiac year. Two weeks before the New Year, Old Aunt Li stopped me on my way home and told me to buy a red rope. ‘Tie it around your waist,’ she said. ‘That’ll get rid of bad luck.’ She was the self-appointed director of the Community Manag…
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‘We meet at various points in the great swathes of the past that neither of us were alive to witness.’
Allen Bratton on a daytrip to a castle with his older boyfriend.
‘Listening to three white poets, whom I suspect are academics, talk about the state of poetry.’
Oluwaseun Olayiwola eavesdrops on an older generation.
‘I’d been dubious about his company at first.’
Sarah Moss on watching Shakespeare with her twelve-year-old son.
‘She didn’t trust us because, to her, tenants were like children.’
Kate Zambreno on negotiating with her older landlady.
‘A moment now swallowed in embarrassment, I asked a question only a young person might ask an older one.’
Lynne Tillman on trying to understand what makes a generation.
‘We decided then to tell each other exactly how a typical fuck played out in our marriages. We couldn’t believe we’d never done this before.’
Fiction by Miranda July.
‘How far can one deviate from the accepted pieties before one is kicked out?’
Brandon Taylor on naturalism and the future of fiction.
‘Diana saw that Lucy’s appeal was in the nostalgia of her looks: Hers was a teen beauty, at home nowhere more than in a miniskirt.’
Fiction by Lillian Fishman.
‘There’s something in her face. Adoration? I mean, she’s drunk. But she clearly has a thing for me.’
Fiction by Rachel Connolly.
‘One did not have high hopes for Gettysburg. Nor for Pennsylvania in general. Having grown up in Indiana, Diana felt she’d earned her condescension.’
Fiction by Jessi Jezewska Stevens.
