In Conversation with R.F. Kuang
“I describe it as Avatar: The Last Airbender if Azula was the main character and everyone was on drugs.” Blending Song dynasty culture with 20th century themes, grounded by grittiness and muddy morality, The Poppy War immediately became one of my favourite novels of 2018. Talking to author Rebec
history didn’t hand me a blueprint
and / time is always running / it’s the one thing that never stops / we can count the seconds / and minutes / and hours / and ask how we spent it / […]
On Kobe Bryant
Just over a week ago, Kobe Bryant died in a horrific helicopter accident. The world at large seems to shake and social media ‘in memoriams’ are plentiful. Justin Bieber recalls how Kobe ‘always encouraged’ him. Trump calls him ‘truly great’. Kendall Jenner’s grief ‘makes [her] feel m
The Fig Tree
The fig tree in the garden is ripening faster than we know what to do with – Figs lie on the counter like a school of purple fish. In a box by the door, more are pressing down. The weight of fig upon fig puts rips into their skin. It is a strange room. There […]
The Lion
The first night my father was gone wasn’t the worst of it but it was bad: the three of us in the big bed, wide awake until dawn. I still remember each long hour. February, and the restless dreamless night stretched on forever, my mother rubbing her freezing feet on us, my brother crawling deep [&h
As Good As It Gets
Prison, according to Roger Hallam, co-founder of environmentalist movement Extinction Rebellion (XR), is ‘as good as it gets.’ After serving a six-week jail term in Wormwood Scrubs, Hallam summarised the prison experience in a Facebook post as consisting of ‘sitting on a bed all day reading bi
Les Uzetiens
Marie Moreau, wife of the fishmonger, was fifty-four years old, childless, stout, and unimaginative, and had lived at number 31, Rue Jean Jaurès, for each of those fifty-four years. For her, the sweetest moment of the day was her cigarette on the balcony of her late mother’s house, forbidden when
the chatter of men and women
and fish in the room calling out her name over and over again was unbearable a courthouse of carp all slippery down the chamber sliding against the defendant as he spoke we could hear ever more loudly the noise of a gavel gulping for air or maybe someone in her statement softly crying? he asked [&he
he and i, we followed a cat in Shanghai
∎ Words by Yasmin Linh Nguyen. Art by Jules Desai.