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Sophie Mackintosh
Sophie Mackintosh's fiction has appeared in Granta and The Stinging Fly, among others. She was the winner of the 2016 White Review Short Story Prize and the Virago X Stylist short story prize. Her debut novel, The Water Cure, is published by Hamish Hamilton in the UK and forthcoming from Doubleday in the US.

Articles Available Online


Lena Andersson's ‘Acts of Infidelity’

Book Review

July 2018

Sophie Mackintosh

Book Review

July 2018

Acts of Infidelity is the second novel by Lena Andersson that follows unlucky-in-love heroine Ester Nilsson, and it’s another scalpel-sharp look at a doomed...

Fiction

May 2018

Self-Improvement

Sophie Mackintosh

Fiction

May 2018

I had been sent back from the city in disgrace, back to my parents’ house in the country. It...

Laure Prouvost begins to tell us about something that happened this morning She woke up with four vegetables on her duvet (a tomato, a carrot, a lemon and an onion) and four corresponding holes in the ceiling of her bedroom The vegetables must have fallen from the sky in the night, she concludes, even though they are the kind that grows out of the ground Perhaps they were a gift from a higher power, a sign that her missing grandfather, a conceptual artist and friend of Kurt Schwitters, is still alive? He started digging a hole that would reach from his house in North London all the way to Africa, but he has disappeared, leaving his wife to grow fat (apparently she eats crisps all the time) The rooms in her grandparents’ house are covered in mud, absolutely covered in mud There is mud everywhere, she says – it covers the walls and the floor and the furniture A priest has told her the vegetables probably dropped from a plane or something Vegetables dropping from a plane seems more implausible than a sign from god, even to a priest ‘Gracious goodness me!’ said Chicken-licken, ‘the sky must have fallen; I must go and tell the King’   Prouvost has been invited by Wysing Arts Centre to stage a performance Lansdowne House, situated in the Cambridgeshire countryside, to around seventy people seated on the kind of gold chairs you might find at a wedding reception (there is a marquee outside)  She speaks into a microphone, breathy and close – she is confessing after all And then she starts shouting – ‘Grandfather! Grandfather!’ Her face is red and her hair is all over the place, aping the actions of a woman in the story she is telling who regularly strips naked and jumps out of a plane with a rope tied around her ankles The woman has been calling for Prouvost’s lost grandfather too, even though, as she has just told us, he is lost deep underground She asks that we find our own way to help look for him   Prouvost makes videos, but also

Contributor

April 2016

Sophie Mackintosh

Contributor

April 2016

Sophie Mackintosh’s fiction has appeared in Granta and The Stinging Fly, among others. She was the winner of the...

Grace

Prize Entry

Issue No. 17

Sophie Mackintosh

Prize Entry

Issue No. 17

14. It comes for me in the middle of the day when I am preparing lunch, quartering a tomato then slicing each segment in...

READ NEXT

feature

March 2014

Burroughs in London

Heathcote Williams

feature

March 2014

I first met William Burroughs in 1963. I was working for a now defunct literary magazine called Transatlantic Review...

feature

October 2013

Enjoy His Symptoms?

Michael Sayeau

feature

October 2013

We lack the philosophers that we require for an era marked by agitation and occupation. From the UK student...

poetry

October 2013

Transylvania

Jon Stone

poetry

October 2013

The rabbit darkness just beyond the headlights’ sprawl and parcel darkness stopping up the drivers’ mouths like oaths or...

 

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