Visions of the World in a Letter

There is no story without someone to hear it, no narrative without its listener...

Although very often as readers we are happy to become the implicit recipient of a story, the heart and mind on the receiving end of someone's voice, there's something very special about a book written with a specific reader in mind, yet published for anonymous thousands - a message captured with intimate urgency for specific, yet unknown, eyes, which not only offers us a complete, textured relationship, but also deeply longer-for visions of the world and how it might change.

On Thursday we're utterly stoked to be hosting a virtual conversation with author Julietta Singh about her entirely unique book The Breaks. Written as a letter to her six-year-old daughter, it draws essential, organic threads between bodily breakages, societal and ecological collapse, between colonial heritage, capitalism and white supremacy, whilst fiercely championing a kind of parenthood as unlearning, queer family making - and a learning alongside a new generations.

To celebrate this wonderful book, and invite you to tune in on Thursday, we've placed it here alongside some if its predecessors in groundbreaking epistolary writing. You'll find books by James Baldwin and Ta-Nehisi Coates (both inspirations for The Breaks) and other letters from older author to younger recipients, but also some letters serving as portraits of fictional worlds.

We wish you many a splendid rabbit hole. Book your slot for Thursday's conversation with Julietta Singh HERE!