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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’m screaming lying alone in this settlement     everything empty only emptiness sex – is a desert     evening coming home from work desiring on the shopfloor or in the machine or at some other labour of language feel it: there’s nothing there only a desert     coming home from work I’m writing a letter to the first boy why’d you deceive me, you know there’s nothing there nothing nothing only a desert     I’m in the desert alone and desire fades laying sex bare like vision like trembling on the horizon is the body of a dry old man this is my sex this is my future     hundreds of animals will come and hump me a tiger’s sperm leaps toward the clouds monkeys lick my clitoris but none of them will say: ‘sex is a desert’     in the garden of atavisms lifting my skirt, leaning on the barbed-wire fence barely discerning the face in the wilds of bloody tears I, weeping, will say: ‘look at what we were struggling for, marching naked past parliaments, penetrating with phalluses the offices of government no, there’s nothing there, sex is a desert’     I love you and your dead sex still moves me but when I love you I feel: only a desert     the smooth temple of marriage bathed in wine gone bad the raw looks of new lovers the embraces of boys, covered with feces, tears girls with black scars and bright dildos baring their breasts before the river of people dying     what were we struggling for? why all these poems?     the dying camp of peoples in the depths of the analyst you die with them, too, analyst, saying: ‘Desert’ because there is no hidden pleasure in the desert     only sand only heat masturbation and solitude     only womanhood only the desert     crowds of furious men, turning in their zinc coffins crowds of men fondling, flying on a varnished bomb the industry of depravity in space stations, the science of art in the bathhouse all for nothing, procreation is only part of the desert     Kathy, Kathy, wanking off death, I can’t see your face, there’s no dialogue, no strength to tell you how things stand for you, you’re not here, Kathy, the body has no identity in the bitter printed word     the rod in a thrown open bible, student marches little puddles of blood in a dark toilet, where my farewell lament addressed faded out to the dead students and their movement       with knives stuck in the hips with the tender kisses of events I want to say: here is the

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

September 2013

Seiobo There Below

László Krasznahorkai

TR. Ottilie Mulzet

fiction

September 2013

1 KAMO-HUNTER Everything around it moves, as if just this one time and one time only, as if the...

Interview

February 2016

Interview with Gerard Byrne

Izabella Scott

Interview

February 2016

I first encountered Gerard Byrne’s eerily dislocated films at Tate Britain, where 1984 and Beyond (2005–7) was shown on...

Interview

March 2014

Interview with Antón Arrufat

TR. Jennie Rothwell

J. S. Tennant

Interview

March 2014

Author of the novels La noche del aguafiestas and the experimental Ejercicios para hacer de la esterilidad virtud, Antón...

 

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