Pink Tulips
"I want our story to be one of fields of flowers and quiet sunsets. I
do not wish for violence."
Ismat Chughtai on Indian female experiences
The Quilt and Other Stories is a 1994 compilation of short stories by Ismat Chughtai (1915-1991), a prolific writer of 20th-century India. She occupied...
49 Years of Matrimony
Agnes need not have walked in on them fucking to know what was going on.
Ghosts in the Attic
'Unpack-repack. That recurring dream that you only have in your Home Bed...'
Little Giveaways
"Jazz was being played over the stereo like theme music, as if they were acting in a television drama where each character had some essential trait, some crucial role."
Specks
"From a space we might call "above", an Entity watches - gargantuan, unfathomable, other."
A Quick Trip Far Away
"One summer, a summer which now seems to have passed by long ago, I slept and dreamt for the first time on the mainland."
21st Century Midas
"‘Look, you have drunk £3.15. You fool, that’s £3.15 you’ve eaten.’ Clink, the cup on the saucer, the coins sliding down my throat."
Forgive me, Katherine Mansfield, for I have sinned.
"The essay I would go on to write, and, reader, the article I had drafted and readied for this very publication, would, I see now, have Mansfield, alongside pretty much every other writer of fiction, willing to cross both space and time in order to beat me around the head with a copy of Crime and Punishment."
The Masque of the Red Death: Reading our way out of a crisis
Edgar Allan Poe wrote his short story, the Masque of the Red Death, after his wife had been diagnosed with the then-incurable disease, tuberculosis....
Dispatches: ‘Marooned between past and present, not here’
A short story of everyday escapism, by Izzy Smith
Anything but a simple fairy-tale
Ebere Nweze is impressed by this unnerving and sharp new adaptation of Wilde’s short story
Fiction: “Alone it is far harder to imagine”
Alexandra Illingworth explores the poignancy of growing up with a fraught sibling relationship
You fucked her and now you’re fucked
Prose by Cameron Finlay about the kind of discourse that follows a life-altering accident