In the depths of February, summer seems a long way away – so for this week’s cover reveal we’re taking you somewhere sunny. Tom Jackson’s Postcard From The Past, based on the cult Twitter account, is a nostalgic and hilarious collection of real-life messages from the backs of vintage British postcards, and its cover will have you longing for piers, seagulls and ice cream…
A few years ago, I became an air writer. I was not bereft of ideas. I was simply unable to commit any of them to paper. Instead, I wrote paragraphs in my head. This may have been interesting in a conceptual John Cage sort of way, but it was more than a little frustrating.
There were reasons for this stoppage. My father had recently suffered two strokes, and even when the pressures of emergency care subsided into a quieter form of durational care, I found myself in a permanent state of vigil and anxiety. I had grown so accustomed to being interrupted by emergency calls and hospital news, I began interrupting myself whenever I sat down to work.
‘Write Here’ takes us into our authors’ writing spaces across the globe, where they tell us about how they go about their craft. We mark each location on the map at the bottom of each post. Today we travel to Manhattan, New York, where Imbolo Mbue writes from the living room in her apartment.
Emergency Admissions isn’t really a book at all. Or maybe it’s two books.
I grew up in a bohemian family with one, two, or possibly three, mad, hard drinking parents (depended what day of the week it was) and people said I should write a book about that. Then years later as something of a contrast I ended up with my own children and working in the NHS emergency ambulance service, and people said I should write a book about that.
Only when the agent suggested it and I did a bit of psychoanalysis on myself did I realise they were actually the same book, and Emergency Admissions is the result. Read more…
