Blip (a short story)

(the first of a series of 1-page shorts on homelessness, destitution, stories that document the homeless experience for our homeless project. Some will be fictional, some factual)
He sits on the sloping stones. He sits at the end of the cycle lane that passes by the University library, on the way into town. It can’t be [...]

Andre Brink: A Fork in the Road

Andre Brink reads from his memoir tomorrow as part of the season of guest speakers at the Newcastle Centre for Literary Arts.
‘It started with a passionate love affair with Jeanne d’Arc when I was not yet fourteen,’ writes Andre Brink, the South African novelist, scholar, and opponent of apartheid, of his Francophilia—or more precisely his [...]

Some posts on happiness

A little bit of a round-up from my reading morning from book blogs and most things I’ve come across, happily, have been on, well, happiness…

Without Bounds on the dificulty of capturing happiness in literature.
Lizzie Siddal on two novellas about happiness, and her own take on what constitutes happiness (a blue sky – looking out of [...]

Writing and the flowering of imagination

How do we imagine feeling? There are two questions there: first, how do we imagine? And then, how do we imagine concepts that are not in themselves tangible objects in the world out there—a flower, a horse, another person–but in here, inside the space behind our foreheads? And a third question: if we imagine feelings, [...]

Interregnum: Lessing, emotion and cats

The cats that crowded around our dining table in Istanbul were not as under-fed as you might expect from feral animals. (In Spain, for example, they are much less like house cats out for the night, as they are here, and more properly wild, desperate and subaltern in their emaciation.) A white, mangy, dirty looking [...]