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Aaron Peck
Aaron Peck is the author of The Bewilderments of Bernard Willis and Letters to the Pacific.

Articles Available Online


The Abyss Echoes Back: Judith Schalansky’s ‘An Inventory of Losses’

Book Review

January 2021

Aaron Peck

Book Review

January 2021

Early in Judith Schalansky’s An Inventory of Losses, the narrator describes the way an ancient form of writing survived oblivion. The soft clay tablets...

Book Review

May 2018

Harry Mathews’s ‘The Solitary Twin’

Aaron Peck

Book Review

May 2018

Imagine a small fishing village on the edge of the world. Its inhabitants are progressive and content. The surroundings...

siphoning   habitual catalogue of the day, intro ft blossom fallen from a gated property and crisping on the pavement’s piss-streaked sun, kicked out of shape by the advance of a woman whose feet pass quickly then recede in the distance soon followed by a girl whose shoulders curl a phonetic c as she frowns (at feet/blossom/pavement) at which point the narrative corrects the woman as Mother & the latter grammar as Disobedient Daughter, and the world shakes off its hope of distance to assume a familiar shape: in which the blossom becomes fallout of some unseen conflict & we the barely treading water, like toothless children bobbing for apples & ushering worlds round their axes       What Genie Got   She got it in the chest like the thump of Elijah, awoke one morning to the trumpet of her mother, its mouthpiece fused to the notch above her sternum All Genie knew was that she woke up for school, and saw the duvet rising sharply between her breasts, its worn-out cotton an ascending minaret that tugged itself back in reverence, declaring the terrible instrument in matrilineal splendour Genie didn’t touch or caress its tubulation, to try & still its cries, but as she breathed out slowly the trumpet started yelling so that cracks began to scale the walls, each one spawning derivatives as she fought with the trumpet for air Genie held her breath and the artex started raining   The year processed in discord Genie became adept at the opposite of breathing & made very little sound at all But her mother’s orchestra had other plans: her gangs of woodwind would heckle from buildings through menacing throats of gargoyles, while brassy-eyed buttons of anonymous instruments winked like fish skins from hedges They always seemed to meet her at the importunest of moments: on Saturdays spent working at hotel wedding functions, when the sudden exhalation of an untuned celesta might shatter her tray of champagne flutes; or the time she tried to kiss Serina behind the privacy of her locker, only to find it filled with cymbals, stacked like dry-stone making horizontal purdahs of the sweetly staling air It was only the one cymbal that slipped out of line, but Serina backed away, unravelled by its timbre Genie was left in the reverberant air, breathing in the lustful geometry of lockers; the plasterboard walls of discoloured posters and fading acne of blu-tack; the fluids that

Contributor

May 2017

Aaron Peck

Contributor

May 2017

Aaron Peck is the author of The Bewilderments of Bernard Willis and Letters to the Pacific.

Gloria

fiction

May 2017

Aaron Peck

fiction

May 2017

Bernard, whenever he thought of Geoffrey, would remember his gait on the afternoon of their first meeting. Geoffrey walked with the confidence of a...

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feature

June 2015

Uneasy Lies the Head

William Watkin

feature

June 2015

Last October I was standing in my kitchen, waiting for espresso to trickle from the spout of our imposing...

Interview

February 2016

Interview with Gerard Byrne

Izabella Scott

Interview

February 2016

I first encountered Gerard Byrne’s eerily dislocated films at Tate Britain, where 1984 and Beyond (2005–7) was shown on...

feature

October 2012

Film: Palestinian Airlines

Eddie Wrey

feature

October 2012

    Palestinian Airlines Produced and Directed by Eddie Wrey Co-produced and translated by Max Wrey Co-edited by Rye...

 

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