I’d rather not tell you my name, if that’s okay with you. This story isn’t about me. It’s about Espen Stengard, who was born in 1994 in a shitty little town in Kent, which is in the South East of England, not far from the throbbing heart of the old empire. This was the year…
When I was younger and grew up reading mostly fantasy (Magician by Raymond E. Feist is one of my all-time favourites) I didn’t pay attention to a lot. I just loved the magic, the dragons, the story. Looking back, when reading Magician for a fifth time, I noticed that the first line is objectively dull. The…
Roth’s “The Plot Against America” must’ve struck the average reader as pertinent when it was first published in 2004, given the growth of the Iraq and Afghanistan conflict, but nothing had prepared me for how shockingly the plot of this alternative-history novel reflects modern American society. Perhaps I am placing too much importance on my own…
Bui Vien is the central street in the backpacker district of Ho Chi Minh. At night, the street heaves with the coming and going of motorcycle and taxi traffic, which have to literally push through the body of people that line the pavement and road. There are small, re-purposed shops that sell tourists and locals…
Life is seeing a woman in a white dress, that touches the dirty pavement, stumble drunkenly down the road at midnight. Life is finding solace in the quiet moments, in the peaceful parts, the tops of unused industrial stacks or at the end of the garden, where an old tree stands. Wondering to itself, observing…
This week has been both disgustingly shocking and happily reassuring. The media consistently spins out everything that goes wrong in Trump’s White House into a full-blown scandal. We’re going to have to put up with this for four years. This is what’s called “desensitization.” When will the media realise that this has been Trump’s grand…
Hundreds of families live on building sites in Ho Chi Minh. Vast amounts of money are pouring into the famous city of Saigon, from Taiwan, China and Singapore. This money manifests itself in the form of new skyscrapers and residential buildings to cater for the emerging middle-class in Vietnam.
I’ve run to the romantic city. The sinking city. Years before she’d asked me if we we could go, together, and now I’m here, alone. The waterways are green-blue and the yellow-fronted houses are crumbling. Henry James wrote of the empty palaces, I’m here to write of the emptiness of the whole adventure. On the…
Seal Matches 