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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...

1 I see your picture for the first time two summers ago, sometime in early July I am scrolling through Facebook, my forearms hurting from spending too much time at the computer, when I chance upon a picture of you with your arm around a girl I recognise from my time at art school I am taken by your face, the top half of which is covered by a pair of sunglasses, the bottom with a thick moustache You are wearing a full sleeve T-shirt, and a pair of headphones hang casually around your notably broad neck I can’t be sure given the fuzzy background, but it looks like you are standing in the middle of a busy marketplace ‘OMG full lowwww!’ someone comments beneath the picture ‘Full loweeeee1 is right!’ you reply Based on the delight on the girl’s face as she looks up at you, delirious from your attention, I assume a romantic bond I am jealous of her happiness, of her ability to hold you and look at you the way she does, in a way that I imagine I will never be able to I remember first encountering your photograph while sitting in my bedroom in my old family house in West Delhi, by the window overlooking the large sports complex with the cricket field and newly built swimming pool But this cannot be right Your photograph was uploaded on 2 July, 2016, well after my parents and I had relocated to their current house in North Delhi, in late 2013 I remember the first time I saw a series of pornographic magazines was in that old house, on a summer’s day in August 1995 Perhaps this is why my memory plays tricks on me, for I have since returned to your picture with the same furtive image-lust That day in ’95 I skipped school, pretending to be sick so that I could re-watch three video cassettes I had found in the TV cupboard some months earlier, none of which were explicit per se, but all of which contained a few

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

April 2017

The White Review Short Story Prize 2017 Shortlist (UK & Ireland)

feature

April 2017

  click on the title to read the story   A Journey Through Famous by Kanye West by Liam...

Art

Issue No. 3

Dead Unicorns: Apocalyptic Anxiety in Canadian Art

Vanessa Nicholas

Art

Issue No. 3

David Altmejd’s installation for the Canada Pavilion at the 2007 Venice Biennale was a complex labyrinth of ferns, nests...

Interview

February 2011

Interview with David Vann

Marissa Cox

Interview

February 2011

I am a little apprehensive about meeting David Vann for the first time. His father committed suicide when David...

 

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