Recitations

The kitchen is warm, brightly-lit, smoke-hazed, and low-ceilinged. American Sylvia, who started menstruating again after the Salisbury blackout, leans along the wall with her husband Anders, the only one with any usable Slavic trauma. Silver candles line the oak, stamped with the coat of arms of a family that no longer exists: a heron piercing its own neck, beak dribbling royal blue into the tempered grey. She glances at the dripping bag in Lev’s hands, and when she speaks every sentence is a question. 

“Thank God, man, we’re all absolutely starving, is it raining outside, Bassett says you’re making us something vegetarian?” She looks at him and lights a cigarette from the wick of a melting candle. “Andy has been teaching himself to can vegetables, haven’t you, Andy?”

“In the event of further escalation,” nods Anders.

Victoria Comstock-Kershaw

From hermetic monks working on illuminated manuscripts in peril of Viking raids to Montaigne sequestered in his tower as the Wars of Religion raged in the Dordogne, the relationship between literature and societal collapse is tacit. Not least, the weariness and fear of the period propel the writer to re-imagine whatever is at hand and immortalise what’s been lived.

After the harvest is when one preserves perishable foods. But it’s also the time to store memories, reflect, and configure them in new ways, so that Summer stories sustain a stony Winter. Whether collapse is on its way or not, Autumn is the season for comparable preparations. 

Gamey, pungent, spiced, and pickled; sample some of the best writing in season.

Recitations is organised with Rose Lyddon.