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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...

JOY OF THE EYES   The future is not the beginning, but the forerunner, of a new intense-formation   The first time that you see me, you will see me, without implication of time   The future expresses what is going to take place at some time to come, adding on the one hand an implication of will or intention, on the other hand of promise or threatening   If you, villain, had not stopped [prāgrahīṣyaḥ] my mouth, Without any implication of time   Circles of future and desiderative border one another; the one sometimes expected where the other might be met   I, conditional, want you to stop my mouth; will you stop My mouth encircles the sustain of these refusals: Sometimes and unexpected, unreasonable and polite   If you, beautiful, would perceive this new stress-formation, Reducing the noise of our [śyas] tomorrow, Heads shaved, future universe, ‘victorious banners unlowered’   Discipline of desire begins in the mouth         PENSIVE REFLECTION   Imagine a time in which you feel happy In your happiness, you imagine another time in which you feel unhappy You are in bed, your love is in your arms; the room is cold and it belongs to you   This is the tower of the past The battlements are formed of anthills, the anthills the curves of the goddess, the curves snakes agreeing sealing themselves away Lookouts lie face down, mouths open to the earth, swallowing the matter of their warnings Lookouts are snakes   In your unhappiness, you imagine another time in which you feel happy You are standing, you catch sight of your love across the room One or both of you is wearing a uniform The room is warm; it does not belong to you   The tower is oversaturated and impossible to date Lookouts’ mouths fill with earth, earth itching, itching converting warning to retch Lookouts reduce the noise of their retching; snakes containing the warnings in the smoothed lines of their swallows   This is how to conjugate the old future tense    

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...

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Interview

October 2015

Interview with Valeria Luiselli

Stephen Sparks

Interview

October 2015

Valeria Luiselli’s second novel, The Story of My Teeth, was commissioned by two curators for an exhibition at Galeria...

fiction

March 2015

House Proud

Amelia Gray

fiction

March 2015

It’s harder to leave your burning home after you’ve spent so much time cleaning its floors. Watching those baseboards...

feature

March 2013

Celan Reads Japanese

Yoko Tawada

TR. Susan Bernofsky

feature

March 2013

There are some who claim that ‘good’ literature is actually untranslatable.  Before I could read German, I found this...

 

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