On a sunny September day in the early 1990s, a German couple taking a shortcut through the rock spires on the Austrian-Italian border spotted the head and back of a man jutting from a patch of half-melted ice. The couple, thinking they’d stumbled across the corpse of a mountaineer, told the owner of the inn they were staying at. He, in turn, contacted the authorities, who sent a forensic investigator.
Category: non fiction
COMFORT FOODS // Ends and Pieces – Lisa Ochoa
You’ve probably never noticed them. Their red and white box usually sits well below their thick-cut, smoked, and maple-flavored cousins in their clear ‘look at me!’ packaging. Or, sometimes, Ends and Pieces aren’t displayed at all, and you have to ask the butcher for them. Because mind you, they are the ends and pieces, the leftovers, the scraps. Who would want them?
My mom, that’s who.
ESSAY | Initiation – Kate Stukenborg
I wanted to be a part of their club, their conversations, their laughter. Eating, I decided, was my way in.
Porridge Books of the Year 2023
From Prince Harry’s TMI memoir to Barbara Kingslover’s Appalachian bildungsroman, the team at Porridge share their favourite novels and non-fiction reads of 2023.
F*ck Cancer: Fighting the Odds in 21st Century America – Leah Mueller
No one is ever prepared for these dreaded words: your husband’s got cancer. I should have known, but I didn’t. For months, my husband Russ complained of muscle weakness, nausea, blood in his stools, and dizziness. His new primary care provider, a man lauded by his young receptionist as a “genius”, said, “If you…
Body Positivity and Fat Acceptance – Changing the World to Suit Personal Grievances? – Catherine Drysdale
I originally wanted to write an article about how different diets suit different people, and how breaking away from my father’s belief in the Atkins diet and doing my own research was liberating for me. I had hoped that those reading this article would find a similarly freeing effect, and it would give them hope…
Feeling Myself – Dolly Church
When my body was made up of straight lines it felt boyish and uninteresting, and when those lines finally bent, they felt uncontrollable.
An interview with Nora Selmani
Nora Selmani is a writer and poet based in London, an MA student in Comparative Literature at Kings College London and an Arts & Humanities editor at Porridge. We caught up with Nora to find out more about her first collection of poetry, Portraits, which has recently been released by the Cardiff-based publisher Lumin. In Portraits,…
The Chore of the Text – Robert Boucheron
This essay by Robert Boucheron is also featured in Issue Two of Porridge, available for purchase here. Robert Boucheron grew up in Syracuse and Schenectady, New York. He has worked as an architect in New York City and since 1987 in Charlottesville, Virginia. His short stories and essays appear in Bellingham Review, Fiction International, London Journal…
Cat people – Antonia Cundy
Antonia Cundy is an postgraduate student at the University of Cambridge, studying on an MPhil in American Literature. She has written (poetry and prose) for The Financial Times, The Economist, and The Oxonian Review, amongst others. Her work can be found at www.antoniacundy.com. Image: paul morris on Unsplash Cat People On 11th December 2017, The New Yorker published Kristen Roupenian’s short story, ‘Cat Person’,…
Air transport, carbon emissions, and capitalism – Muntazir Jaffer
Image: Fighting for Air, Amazing Productions, 2018 Muntazir Jaffer is a boutique cosmetics designer with a focus on sustainability in personal care. After graduating with from the University of Birmingham with a MEng in Chemical Engineering, he was baffled by the minimal adoption of green technology across the UK and now rants continuously about sustainable…
The Illusion of Distance – Jack Crowe
Image: Richard Hamilton, Interior, 1965. Jack Crowe is a graduate with a Masters in Creative Writing from the University of Birmingham. He performs as a poet across the UK, and otherwise writes in his far too voluminous spare time. His website is jackcrowejackcrowe.co.uk. The Illusion of Distance When Dennis Kimetto broke the marathon world record in Berlin in 2014, he set off from…
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