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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...

In the grape hyacinth blue jersey – yellow strip at V-neck, blue tie, navy trousers of Kinsale Community School, Wesley Loramar would wait in cubicles at the public lavatory at the beginning of Pier Road, Kinsale, aged sixteen, with the look of the bored cherub in Raphael’s The Madonna of the San Sisto   Kinsale, with its whaling frame houses, was where the pirate, Anne Bonny, was from   Anne’s lawyer father, William Cormac, got a servant girl, Peg Brennan, pregnant The three fled to Charleston, North Carolina where William became a plantation owner   When she was thirteen Anne stabbed a servant girl At sixteen she married and went off with James Bonny, a pirate On sea she had a homosexual companion, Pierre Bouspeut   She decided to elope with another pirate, John ‘Calico’ Rackham On the ship Revenge she met Mark Read who was really Mary Read and they became lovers   The ship was captured October 1720, the men executed, the two women spared because they claimed pregnancy   Wesley, wheaten and auburn hair, Titian red eyebrows, body like a military road, hoping to be picked up, would be seen hitchhiking in school uniform on the Inishshannon Road, three miles North West of Kinsale, close to Dunderrow, not far from the Bandon River   Dunderrow – fortress of oak plain   There is an American chemical factory there now   Coins left by Elizabeth’s forces before the Battle of Kinsale 1601, have been found here   In yesteryears Mrs Harrington would travel by pony and trap from Kinsale each day to teach here, picking up pupils on the way   Her pony was cared for while she was teaching by the Bowen family   A man named Billy the Butlerowned the local manor just prior to Miss Harrington’s career   Bankruptcy had dogged successive owners of that manor and he too went bankrupt   Wesley would be seen coming out of Dunderrow wood, which had the sow-like smell of lesser celandine in spring – slight moustache like the down inside the foxglove – where he’d lain with workers from the chemical factory He was like Orpheus who stole their husbands from the Thracian women   Some said he’d been doing this since he’d worn the grey

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

September 2014

Missing Footage

Raphael Rubinstein

feature

September 2014

The discovery of absences (lacks, lacunae) and their definition must in turn lead the filmmaker as composer to the...

poetry

February 2014

Two Poems from A Finger in the Fishes Mouth

Derek Jarman

poetry

February 2014

To mark the 20th anniversary of Derek Jarman’s death, Test Centre has produced a facsimile edition of his sole,...

fiction

January 2016

Dimples

Eka Kurniawan

TR. Annie Tucker

fiction

January 2016

Moments ago, the woman with the lovely dimples had been shivering, utterly ravaged by the evening, but now her...

 

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