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Aaron Peck
Aaron Peck is the author of The Bewilderments of Bernard Willis and Letters to the Pacific.

Articles Available Online


The Abyss Echoes Back: Judith Schalansky’s ‘An Inventory of Losses’

Book Review

January 2021

Aaron Peck

Book Review

January 2021

Early in Judith Schalansky’s An Inventory of Losses, the narrator describes the way an ancient form of writing survived oblivion. The soft clay tablets...

Book Review

May 2018

Harry Mathews’s ‘The Solitary Twin’

Aaron Peck

Book Review

May 2018

Imagine a small fishing village on the edge of the world. Its inhabitants are progressive and content. The surroundings...

Day 1 in the Season before Chaos   These were the days before the glitch The weather was acutely neurotic, four seasons compressed into one week, then a week of endless rain, then another four seasons compressed into the following week, then the sweltering days that promised summer in November and the carpet of snow that covered the early daffodils The future bionic woman didn’t have a chip incrusted on her cranium yet She had no idea chance was about to randomise her existence She had no idea what the future had in store for her She didn’t know she was going to become a cyborg She didn’t know a quantum leap was about to snatch her up She knew nothing There were no signs foretelling a prolonged holiday from her usual self, just the habitual vicissitudes of climate change and the average sweet and sour twang of global city life   She had made a few adjustments to her life, though   She was ready to start a new phase   On the 28th November 02, she had highlighted the word ‘orgasmic’ from a book about dreams It wasn’t a word she necessarily related to sex or to the feel the advertising industry attaches to the surface of its products It was a word she associated with discovering ecstatic pleasure in unsuspected things, jouissance She had printed the word in Adventure Subtitles N Bold lower-case size font 16, cut out the A4 paper into a third and placed the big note on the wall above her PC:     orgasmic     She wanted to tune into the orgasmic side of life Choose her own parameters Dodge life’s drudgery or at least minimize its impact It would require constant effort and vigilance, it was a juggling act that wouldn’t always be easy Daily mortifications were always around the corner But she now had a new project She had decided to seek out beauty in everyday life In a way, she thought about it as modern life’s heroism, or should we say ‘postmodern’ life’s heroism Deleting urban jungle fallout in one stroke, postponing it, isolating it, absconding from the A to Z   Not

Contributor

May 2017

Aaron Peck

Contributor

May 2017

Aaron Peck is the author of The Bewilderments of Bernard Willis and Letters to the Pacific.

Gloria

fiction

May 2017

Aaron Peck

fiction

May 2017

Bernard, whenever he thought of Geoffrey, would remember his gait on the afternoon of their first meeting. Geoffrey walked with the confidence of a...

READ NEXT

feature

April 2017

Everywhere and Nowhere

Vahni Capildeo

feature

April 2017

Part of my reluctance to write on citizenship is that as a poet, a worker in delicate, would-be-truthful language,...

Interview

May 2014

Interview with Eimear McBride

David Collard

Interview

May 2014

Eimear McBride’s first book, the radically experimental A Girl is a Half-formed Thing, was written when she was 27 and...

feature

December 2016

Wildness of the Day

Orlando Reade

feature

December 2016

One day in late 2011, waiting outside Green Park station, my gaze was drawn to an unexpected sight. Earlier...

 

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