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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’ve been keeping a mental list of all the pieces of art that I’ve nursed Leo in front of this past year I remember at first, the two times I was out in public afterwards, both times at the Whitney, I was nervous to take my breast out, because Leo was crying and people were staring, I felt panicky and self-conscious, which I think made the baby more agitated I became used to taking my breast out in art spaces, and began to savour it with sometimes a fatigued perversity and other times something more sacred, like the installation at the Lygia Pape show at the Met Breuer, in the corner of the nearly pitch-black room where gold thread made geometric curtains like beams of light, or recently on a bench in front of the El Greco ‘Holy Family’ at the Met, the way in which Mary presses down on her breast and points the nipple towards baby Jesus, both her and Joseph gazing downwards at the central point of the baby, the baby’s little hand on his mother’s hand I nursed Leo outside the bubblegum phallic Franz West sculpture at MASS MoCA, amidst the industrial landscape and grey cool light, her straddling me, downy head bobbing back and forth between each breast, and this fall in front of a Harry Dodge video at the New Museum’s gender show, because there was a bench to sit on I figured if there were so many penises in that room it was okay to have my breast peek out through my leather jacket, like a floppy blue-veined sac of a sculpture, scratched and sad At the MoMA it is difficult to find a place to breastfeed I didn’t get to see all of the Louise Lawler show because it had taken all of our energy to get there on the subway, and it was almost closing time, and I couldn’t find anywhere I felt comfortable to nurse, as Leo was still quite young and I still felt shaky and strange occupying public space in the city with a baby

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...

READ NEXT

feature

Issue No. 1

(Un)timely considerations on old and current issues

Donatien Grau

feature

Issue No. 1

Criticism has not been doing well lately. The London Review of Books, Europe’s biggest-selling literary publication, would no longer...

Interview

Issue No. 3

Interview with Elmgreen & Dragset

Ben Hunter

Nicholas Shorvon

Interview

Issue No. 3

Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset are among the most innovative, subversive and wickedly funny contemporary artists at work, or...

Interview

June 2013

Interview with Lars Iyer

David Morris

Interview

June 2013

Like so much of the dialogue that marks time across Lars Iyer’s books, this conversation began in the pub....

 

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