Mailing List


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...

I One week after Buzz and Heather broke up, she dragged her mattress into her living room She moved aside the coffee table and put the mattress in front of the TV Just a few weeks before, Buzz had done the same in his apartment so that he could stay up late and watch movies on his used tube TV One night, he’d arranged Heather naked in different positions on the mattress to take pictures of her Heather had secretly felt like Rose from Titanic, but knew that if she said it out loud, Buzz would dump her Heather both liked and disliked the feeling She’d felt subversive allowing herself to be objectified and observed so closely She also felt like a cheeseball thinking of herself as Rose and not as an obscure gamine at the Chelsea Hotel circa 1973   After the breakup, Heather moved her mattress to feel closer to Buzz, to sleep in the same position he was sleeping in But she also moved it to be closer to the television and further away from the bottomlessness of her hysterics She was crying all the time, and she knew the sadness was disproportionate to the romance She cried in the bathroom stall at work, in traffic on the way home In the evenings, she sat on her porch and watched the sun set at the far end of Augusta Avenue, crying into a jam jar full of whiskey, proud of the tableau she had created   The time had come to cauterise the wound Heather made up her bed on the floor, sat down with her cat, whose name was Fuzz, and turned on the television Last time she had had her heart broken, she and the cat had watched the entire run of Star Trek: The Next Generation She looked at the cat now What would it be this time?   II Sometime in the last decade I began watching TV again At first, the shows came on DVDs through the mail Then they came through the languid Internet of the late-naughts Now, they come full and robust and easy; streaming is the word

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

November 2015

Two Poems

Ko Un

TR. Brother Anthony of Taizé

TR. Lee Sang-Wha

poetry

November 2015

Kim Geung-Ryeol   During the Japanese colonial period he attended Japan’s Military Academy, became squadron leader in the Japanese...

Art

August 2016

False shadows

Izabella Scott

Art

August 2016

The ‘beautiful disorder’ of the Forbidden City and the Yuanmingyuan (Garden of Perfection and Light) was first noted by...

poetry

May 2012

REGULAR BLACK

Sam Riviere

poetry

May 2012

Who wouldn’t rather be watching a film about werewolves instead of composing friends’ funeral playlists all day I’ve been...

 

Get our newsletter

 

* indicates required