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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...

LowerGreen is situated in the unlikely surroundings of a near-dead mall in Norwich It is not just any mall, but Anglia Square Shopping Centre: a decaying quondam monument to Modernism circa-1970, in which the architecture calls to mind a cross between a spaceship and an office building from the science fiction film Brazil (1985) – severe, oppressive, featureless at first glance, and possessed of certain smooth, seductive lines at second stare There is a bargain store that sells tote bags pitched unintentionally in the key of Barbara Kruger, with the brilliantly apropos slogan WHEN I DON’T SHOP I FEEL EMPTY, and a cinema called, with some irony, The Hollywood ‘In July, 2013,’ boasts Wikipedia, ‘the cinema hosted the world premiere of Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa’   It is difficult to say why Anglia Square Shopping Centre is appealing, in the same way it is difficult to pinpoint the appeal of certain human faces (The French, in coining jolie laide to describe women who are ugly but incredibly alluring, may have come the closest to elucidating this specific feeling, even if they did not necessarily intend it to describe a building) It is Brutalist, but not in the more elegant mode that tends to be salivated over by the kind of people who WhatsApp each other listings from The Modern House, or regularly eat bone marrow at St John’s, or give their children names like ‘Clementine’ It is extravagant and stately in its ugliness It is unfortunately very, very doomed LowerGreen’s final show will be this spring, thanks to a planned destruction of the shopping centre by the City Council; the area’s redevelopment is slated to cost £271 million, roughly equivalent to 54,308,617 tickets to see Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa at The Hollywood, or 184,000,000 oddly-existential tote bags Weston Homes – the developer whose aim is to replace it with ‘1,234 new homes, a leisure quarter with a cinema, car parks, a 200-bed hotel, [and] a tower block’ – have described the proposed plan as being like ‘Marmite’, which is an especially euphemistic way to say that of the 939 comments submitted to

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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poetry

January 2015

My Beloved Uncles

Tove Jansson

TR. Thomas Teal

poetry

January 2015

However tired of each other they must have grown from time to time, there was always great solidarity among...

poetry

January 2014

Tuesday Will Be War

Jáchym Topol

TR. Alex Zucker

poetry

January 2014

Jáchym Topol (b. 1962), like most Czech authors of his generation, wrote poetry for years before turning to prose....

Prize Entry

April 2016

Seasickness

David Isaacs

Prize Entry

April 2016

‘How would you begin?’   She puts a finger to her lips, a little wrinkled still from the water,...

 

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