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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 disowned my real pain & engaged with its subordinates:   despicable neediness, heroic guilt and undeterrable envy Each day I woke trussed up with this hernia of failure, bleat bleat There was inevitable blood; I slept on a pyre of bottles Stalked by motherhood, unable to summon my latent powers Leaves blew into the hallway and did their ageing there, the eager wind fussed with them like the beaded fringe of a shawl at war with itself Powerful identification with the leaves In the garden, splendour made its entrance while I wasn’t looking I was quaking all this time, my whole body a throat stoppered by tears I tried to will dreams of romantic redemption, but my brain swatted them away, like flies gunning for something you really want to eat     No one should be frightened of pleats (Coco Chanel)   My life has been merely a prolonged childhood Bored, with a squalid boredness that idleness and riches bring about (I would make a very bad dead person) Money is not attractive, it’s convenient The only thing I really like spending is my strength Every time I’ve done something reasonable, it’s brought me bad luck: that sweet smile of gratitude, tinged with a longing to kill me I am ready to start all over again The first people to whom I opened my heart were the dead I hate people touching me, rather as cats do I merely observe that I have grown up, lived, and am growing old alone I loathe people putting order into my disorder Let them skip the pages Sometimes I lose myself in the maze of my legendary fame What an abomination, a ghastly disease! That handsome parasite that is the imagination, lapped up in secret, in the so-called attic I imposed black; it’s still going strong today I don’t have to explain my creations; they have explained themselves I knew how to express my times I used to tolerate colour Changing one’s mind appalls me Do you see what a foul temper I have? I cannot take orders from anyone, except in love, madly, with a man who loathes me Everything is lovely and empty I only care for trivial things, else nothing at all If I built aeroplanes, I would begin by making one that was

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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fiction

March 2011

In the Field

Jesse Loncraine

fiction

March 2011

There were flickers of red in the water, a tint the colour of blood. He stood in the river,...

poetry

March 2017

Two Poems

Uljana Wolf

TR. Sophie Seita

poetry

March 2017

Mittens   winter came, stretched its frames, wove misty threads into the damp   wood. fogged windows, we didn’t...

Interview

Issue No. 15

Interview with Zadie Smith

Jennifer Hodgson

Interview

Issue No. 15

Zadie Smith’s biography is one of contemporary writing’s fondest and most famous yarns of precocious and meteoric literary success....

 

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