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Rebecca Liu
Rebecca Liu is a commissioning editor at Guardian Saturday and a staff writer at Another Gaze.

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There are only girls on the internet

Book Review

August 2022

Rebecca Liu

Book Review

August 2022

I remember the first time I saw it, like a freshly alert hare alarmed by movement in the distant grasslands. It was 2013. Model...

Book Review

September 2020

Pankaj Mishra’s ‘Bland Fanatics’

Rebecca Liu

Book Review

September 2020

The Anglo-American commentariat is full of lofty egos. Pankaj Mishra has developed a reputation as their great deflater. ‘Watch...

I am standing in a parallelogram of shrubbery outside London City Airport Ed is twisting a dial on his Mamiya RZ67 and squinting into its viewfinder He is wearing a Berghaus anorak, as standard, with a beanie hat, hiking boots and a flannel shirt His breath is clouding up around his face The camera’s lens is pointing at a factory in the distance, a complex heap of blocks and towers known locally as Sugar Mountain, officially as Tate & Lyle It rises abruptly at the end of the residential street, a gargantuan prison-like structure that might have functioned as a set for the film adaptation of 1984 had they not used the ruinous Beckton Gas Works a few miles east of here It is an architecturally hermetic building, anxious to preserve the final vestige of industrial productivity in an otherwise idle landscape Directly in front of us is a two-lane arterial road Cars zip past like urgent telegrams Every surface has been designed to enclose, repel or separate There are wooden fences embedded in concrete troughs There are concrete bridges and glass walls There are barriers, railings and painted lines—   ‘Excuse me? You’re not allowed to take pictures here!’   We turn to see a man in a hi-vis vest His nylon shirt is of that municipal noncolour that sits somewhere between turquoise and grey An ID card hangs from a branded lanyard at his neck   The best thing to do in situations like these is ignore the non-threats, take the photograph you’ve come to take and defend that tiny patch of civil freedom from the powers that seek to invade The official seems reluctant to break the invisible screen that separates the designated walking space from the decorative shrubs in which we stand It isn’t long before he strides forth, stepping through the plants in standard-issue boots, to reiterate his demands     * Consciously structured to minimise friction, slowness and delay, airports are places of social and spatial control Their architecture tends towards the abstraction of geometry, lines, lanes, parabolas and arcs; grids across which the traveller moves like a mathematical function Passengers

Contributor

August 2019

Rebecca Liu

Contributor

August 2019

Rebecca Liu is a commissioning editor at Guardian Saturday and a staff writer at Another Gaze.

Jia Tolentino’s ‘Trick Mirror’

Book Review

August 2019

Rebecca Liu

Book Review

August 2019

Talk about the fates of young professional women today and you will often alight on two themes: the anxieties that come with living in...

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Prize Entry

Issue No. 20

The Refugee

Kristen Gleason

Prize Entry

Issue No. 20

Brian Ed waited outside the ration house. Merlijn took his time coming to the door, and opened it slowly....

Interview

Issue No. 1

Interview with Mai-Thu Perret

Timothée Chaillou

Interview

Issue No. 1

Swiss artist Mai-Thu Perret’s ongoing, fourteen year-old project The Crystal Frontier is a multi-disciplinary fiction chronicling the lives of...

Prize Entry

April 2016

Oh Whistle and

Uschi Gatward

Prize Entry

April 2016

God has very particular political opinions – John le Carré     M is whizzing round the Cheltenham Waitrose,...

 

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