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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...

  MODES OF BEING   A new hobby of mine is repeating a word until it strays from its centre of meaning, so risibly            alive (an egg tumbling through grass) unburdened of itself, beyond thinking I lead a rich and duplicitous life on the ward I’m fed well All the residents know me, their cherubic faces assuaging my fears in the midst of some sinister music   I’m happy enough letting the television play, allowing sunlight its languorous dominion   In the cool phosphorescence of these bus stop days (my dust rising and returning) comes feeling       CRYPSIS   Stop the gunboats! Lately I’m relishing being a strange fungus in the meaning of the hall unmolested, my brain a razed monastery of thoughts a prized gourd at the funeral of verbs   I’ve only growth as a means of mobility Here beneath the smashed, chaotic flagstones a specious beach   bestrewn with slogans, garbled soundbites cracked versions of ourselves exhumed in sunlight in a tableau of what’s real   What to tell you? That it’s enough to make beautiful things to love redly despite the expiry date of dogs   That the mind blooms serenely, in virtue of itself: a feted puffball   of which these poems are the spores       THREE OR FOUR HILLS AND A CLOUD   Morning Time to crank up the machine without which this wouldn’t be possible   (You gesture towards some tangerines, a laptop, a fresh pot of coffee)   This still life cannot excite me today, will not sate nor diminish this longing to escape this life for jungle scenes to play swingball with vigour, meet monkeys   Bad example, but you know what I mean about torpor, the bureaucrat’s burden, so often fishing in stagnant pools when each door opens onto salvation   In the next life (whoever you are) I’ll be good, like the spring, if not better I’ll wade out into flowerful fields and disappear I’ll see you tomorrow  

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

poetry

December 2011

Return After Earthquake

Jeffrey Angles

poetry

December 2011

although left for months my house is still standing here on terra firma branches broken by snow fallen into...

poetry

Issue No. 4

Mysteries of Music

Michael Horovitz

poetry

Issue No. 4

Having absently, that’s to say dozily switched on BBC Radio 3 down in the kitchen as is my frequent...

poetry

December 2011

Sonic Peace

Minashita Kiriu

TR. Jeffrey Angles

poetry

December 2011

Beneath the sun My interchangeable routines Are formed from superfluous things Managing this place is A metal will, swelling...

 

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