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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...

  ARTICULATION OF SOLACE FOR W   We are mothering ourselves We are articulating solace for each other We are trying   to not fall in love Write love poems   to not fall in love   The faultline between the language of feeling and the language of catastrophe? We find it Our common language Our white world We are trying   to write close to it Even closer Closeness   changes Every poem was once impossible   Medieval torture devices Phalansteries That’s when it mattered That’s when you wrote it   Your father’s car speeds up the mountain like an unsent letter and you see someone dead   in your dream when he is still alive outside it, watching Kurosawa for you Aliveness   changes The kind   of violence that can be taken back The room   where someone not deadly realized they could care for you and didn’t Or did Now you imagine it emptied The kitchen   without a sink, windswept, glazed emerald-gold   You could picture solace only by bright walls, you said By, not in A nearness   We were listening to Arca together   We were dreaming about an apartment in the Mesozoic A meadow on Neptune   Thinking This relationship Between the cold pomegranates on the table and the porcelain bowl that couldn’t break apart one morning Solace I   wanted islands instead of worlds I wanted a new kind of ice One to hold on to, lying in bed at noon Bitter citrus grafting   like lightning onto my neck so I could be orchards as well As well   as seeds   of thunderstorms   What’s the point of time if we’re never out of it, knocking at your door, in landfall, in someone else’s house   I wanted we, in the second person I wanted unimaginable solace, in the second person   I wanted terrifying friends   to love me You,   carrying away gorgeous bags of treasure every time we meet Deadlight Clearly we were not who we were Clearly we were not dead We were not   mistaken I wanted to look exactly like you   (after Jenny Hval)   *   HERZZEIT   I

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

December 2012

Confessions of an Agoraphobic Victim

Dylan Trigg

feature

December 2012

The title of my essay has been stolen from another essay written in 1919.[1] In this older work, the...

feature

June 2015

Uneasy Lies the Head

William Watkin

feature

June 2015

Last October I was standing in my kitchen, waiting for espresso to trickle from the spout of our imposing...

poetry

April 2014

Obsolescence

Joseph Mackertich

poetry

April 2014

A lot of people tell me my voice is similar to that of the actor Christopher Walken. I don’t...

 

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