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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...

I was fourteen when I first transformed from Rosa into ~<*RoSaBubbLe*>~ Propelled by my adoration of Courtney Love – the lead singer of Hole, who I loved for many reasons but especially because she wrote on her stomach in eyeliner – I travelled down my first internet rabbit hole to the forums of the North American feminist magazine, Bust After school, in the living room I shared with my family, I would dwell in this private portal to a different world which could easily be shut on demand (just click the x)   Here, I found other young women, who were negotiating their similar-but-different lives Because of global capitalism we had a lot in common: they too went to Sizzler all-you-can-eat buffet for a treat with their grandparents, they too loved Courtney I didn’t speak (type) much because they all seemed more articulate than I was and because they were from North America and one was even from London, which seemed like centres of the world to me, back then in the suburbs of Sydney I learnt many things on these forums, but two have stuck with me most vividly The first thing I learnt about was zines, a decidedly low-tech cut-n-stick subculture which I readily embraced The second was something called ‘menstruation porn’, which is exactly what it sounds like I visited the slow-to-load webpage of very happy-looking bleeding people naked in the forest only once I think that, while intrigued, I was also repulsed (fully inhabiting the Freudian meaning of ambivalence), or maybe the dial-up cut out or my mum came home from the supermarket But knowing that it was there and being able to turn it over in my mind was enough Desire it seemed, was much more expansive than I had thought How curious In a world where I had already learnt to be frightened of men, the website taught me that they didn’t necessarily always get to determine how sex — and everything else — might go It was a small, quivering thought against the rest of

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

March 2014

Interview with Antón Arrufat

TR. Jennie Rothwell

J. S. Tennant

Interview

March 2014

Author of the novels La noche del aguafiestas and the experimental Ejercicios para hacer de la esterilidad virtud, Antón...

Interview

May 2014

Interview with Conrad Shawcross

Patrick Sykes

Interview

May 2014

Though an intimidating sixteen feet tall, the industrial robot in Conrad Shawcross’s flat doesn’t look at all out of...

poetry

September 2011

The Cinematographer, a 42-year-old man named Miyagawa, aimed his camera directly at the sun, which at first probably seemed like a bad idea

Michael Earl Craig

poetry

September 2011

Last night Kurosawa’s woodcutter strode through the forest, his axe on his shoulder. Intense sunlight stabbed and sparkled and...

 

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