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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...

In the grape hyacinth blue jersey – yellow strip at V-neck, blue tie, navy trousers of Kinsale Community School, Wesley Loramar would wait in cubicles at the public lavatory at the beginning of Pier Road, Kinsale, aged sixteen, with the look of the bored cherub in Raphael’s The Madonna of the San Sisto   Kinsale, with its whaling frame houses, was where the pirate, Anne Bonny, was from   Anne’s lawyer father, William Cormac, got a servant girl, Peg Brennan, pregnant The three fled to Charleston, North Carolina where William became a plantation owner   When she was thirteen Anne stabbed a servant girl At sixteen she married and went off with James Bonny, a pirate On sea she had a homosexual companion, Pierre Bouspeut   She decided to elope with another pirate, John ‘Calico’ Rackham On the ship Revenge she met Mark Read who was really Mary Read and they became lovers   The ship was captured October 1720, the men executed, the two women spared because they claimed pregnancy   Wesley, wheaten and auburn hair, Titian red eyebrows, body like a military road, hoping to be picked up, would be seen hitchhiking in school uniform on the Inishshannon Road, three miles North West of Kinsale, close to Dunderrow, not far from the Bandon River   Dunderrow – fortress of oak plain   There is an American chemical factory there now   Coins left by Elizabeth’s forces before the Battle of Kinsale 1601, have been found here   In yesteryears Mrs Harrington would travel by pony and trap from Kinsale each day to teach here, picking up pupils on the way   Her pony was cared for while she was teaching by the Bowen family   A man named Billy the Butlerowned the local manor just prior to Miss Harrington’s career   Bankruptcy had dogged successive owners of that manor and he too went bankrupt   Wesley would be seen coming out of Dunderrow wood, which had the sow-like smell of lesser celandine in spring – slight moustache like the down inside the foxglove – where he’d lain with workers from the chemical factory He was like Orpheus who stole their husbands from the Thracian women   Some said he’d been doing this since he’d worn the grey

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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Interview

Issue No. 1

Interview with China Miéville

Ben Eastham

Interview

Issue No. 1

It is a cliché to say that a writer’s work resists classification. It is ironic then that China Miéville,...

feature

March 2015

Plastic Words

Tom Overton

feature

March 2015

Plastic Words was a six-week series of thirteen events which described itself as ‘mining the contested space between contemporary...

Art

March 2014

Amy Sillman: The Labour of Painting

Paige K. Bradley

Amy Sillman

Art

March 2014

The heritage of conceptualism and minimalism leaves a tendency to interpret a reduction in form as intellectually rigorous. If...

 

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