Amsterdam

Short Story

AUGUST, METEOR SHOWER

  It’s August – the month of shooting stars – on the remote island of K. A sudden rain of stardust seizes some people with basorexia – a burning desire…

Short Story

PLAY ALONG

  As agreed, she had changed the wallpaper on her phone to a photo of S: a screenshot of a picture on S’s Instagram account. She had chosen the photo…

Short Story

AH

  Marvelling at … something so obvious … the idea that the world continues to revolve around the sun … that the moon keeps revolving around the earth … that…

Long Read Interview

Alicia Framis On Ailex, My AI Husband

Beware: in one sense, the following conversation doesn’t pass the Bechdel test. In another … well, I’m speaking with Alicia Framis, not about a human man, but about Ailex…

Short Story

THE PIT

‘When did it happen?’ Ronnie’s voice sounds measured on the other end of the line. ‘Less than fifteen minutes ago.’ ‘How did he land?’ ‘Flat…

Short Story

FRESH AIR

  For a while now, she’s been throwing parties without him knowing about it. Sometimes she casually mentions it, three days prior at the most, while putting on her…

Short Story

SOCIETY IS WARM-BLOODED, MULTICOLOURED AND DOING IT!

  In her picture she was wearing a large silver necklace that rested on her chest, covered in beauty marks, and her bare neck. On the app her…

Extra Reading

Boarding School Novels

I remember at least three boxes of them: cream-coloured spines, flaky, facing upward, hairline fractures running through red letters, making the titles barely readable. The Twins at St Clare’s. Malory…

Commissioned Visual Contribution

SP, LU and T

SP, LU and T.  A commission for Extra Extra, 2024. Courtesy: Josse Pyl  …

Long Read Interview

Alessandro Gualtieri on Sniffing the Excess of Soul

A late afternoon in spring 2010 I had one of the most memorable chance meetings of my life. My ex-wife, Kira Nova, and I were wandering along a canal in…

Short Story

OPEN UP

  I’m lying on my side in Madé’s little cot; I still fit inside. According to Madé, I’m the smallest mother in the world. Lately I’ve been having moments…

Short Story

I’M SCROLLING, CAN’T RESIST

  ‘Did you know nuns were this horny?’ Edan asks as we are both on our phones, sitting on either side of the couch, our feet touching. He turns…

Short Story

MEN LIKE ME LIGHT UP

  During the last recession, like thousands of others, I was sacked first and then kicked out of my house; now every few nights I slept on a different…

Short Story

SUGAR CRACKLE SHORTCAKE

  For our fourteen-year wedding anniversary I bought a box of instant cheese fondue. It is our anniversary ritual: I bought his favourite food, and he bought mine. Like…

Portfolio

Viviane Sassen
Extra Reading

The Epistolary

Writing letters – and let me expand that to emails or text messages with enough sentences to warrant interpunction – so often ignites amorous relationships. The visceral, urgent conviction…

Protagonist of the Erotic

Ocean Vuong – Of Ghosts

  Though she sometimes included them in letters to family and friends, the poems of Emily Dickinson were largely discovered after her death. Her manuscripts are often not definitive:…

Short Story

LIP BALM

  As Haron learned through the hardcore gabber that his mum used to play when he was little, music can be a physical sensation as well. Seconds before forcing himself…

Short Story

JULIA

  Guess who I just saw? Two seconds later, it dings again: Julia. With those five letters, the kitchen starts to whirl, and for a moment I’m swirling in turbulence,…

Extra Reading

Erotic Poetry

Poetry feels like sex above the body. Where erotic scenes in other literary genres are often structured linearly, poems are not restrained by boundaries of space, time or…

Some Thoughts On...

Wine

Nº1 • Liquid Pearl Antiquity’s most famous lovers were also fond of wine, especially the sweet wines of Egypt. Cleopatra reportedly seduced…

Portfolio

Ayşen Kaptanoğlu
Tentacular Thinking

Finding My Voices

  The first words I ever spoke were Chinese. I was eight months old and had taken to throwing my stuffed rabbit out of my crib. My mother –…

Portfolio

Paul Kooiker
Short Story

TOO EARLY

  Her first love affair had been perfect: sweet, brief and superficial, it had solved the problem of virginity in a timely, fuss-free way. This is what she thought…

Short Story

HIS PLACES

  ‘It is not the “person” of the other that I need, but the space.’ – Roland Barthes Bookstore He grabs a book…

Protagonist of the Erotic

Anne Carson – In Sensual Gestures

  ‘The Glass Essay’ (1994) was the first work of Anne Carson I read in Ian Rae’s class in 2002 at McGill University, where Carson was a professor of…

Short Story

OLD BOYS

  I loved our heels in the dark, the click-clacking on the pavement that said we made no excuses and if people stared at us we’d be like fuck…

Short Story

OFFICE FOR THE UNATTAINABLE

  I saw the number on a lamp post. A round sticker, pink letters: In love with an unattainable? Call 020- … I was cycling home from the club,…

Short Story

ON DEMAND

  The house party in the kitchen is in full swing, but Sonya is feeling bored. She presses her forehead against the window in the corridor of the…

Short Story

THE SMELL OF BROCCOLI

  In her profile picture she was holding the phone, which she was using to take a mirror selfie, at mouth level. Now he understood why. She smiled broadly…

Short Story

SUDDENLY IT’S GRONINGEN

  Suddenly it’s there, the city of Groningen. Other cities introduce themselves slowly with fringes of industry, suburbs and posters under flyovers advertising parties and restaurants. The approach to…

Short Story

THE BATH

  In the black-and-white picture in Het Parool you are smiling, and before I start reading I already know: you’re dead. I lower the cat off my lap, plant…

Short Story

THE DANNY WALLACE PRINCIPLE

  Death operates on a tight schedule at Sunny Acres Cemetery, which has seen its ranking as our city’s most popular and picturesque graveyard rise to even greater heights…

Short Story

THROWING THREE BALLS IN THE AIR TO GET A STRAIGHT LINE

  She runs out the door without breakfast to take her child to daycare. In the classroom the Surinamese teacher is juggling three tangerines – she throws them all…

Short Story

ZEAL

  Maria breathes deeply. A slight smacking of her lips as if she were licking an ice cream, a little snore, a long hum, and she breathes out slowly.

Short Story

DROWNING

One summer’s day, I forgot to put my lenses in. My window was open, an insect flew inside and I killed it without knowing what species it was.

Short Story

FALLING

  Will you give me a call now and then? she had said. She was standing beside my bed and pulling her top over her head. Bare-bummed, she slipped…

Short Story

(AUROPUNCTATA)

  There was a mirror in the basement and in those days, I avoided mirrors. Every time I caught a glimpse of the smirk on my face, I felt…

Short Story

HEMISPHERES

  A World of Hemispheres is a science-fiction novella by A.K. Anthony. The work remained unpublished and was destroyed by the author. The excerpts published here were reconstructed…

Short Story

THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO WIM

1. When my mum met her new boyfriend, who was just called Henk and who would later become my stepfather, God came into our lives, and he…

Short Story

WITHOUT BONES

  I live above the shop, and the shop has been closed for months now. I only sleep downstairs, where I’ve pushed all the beds together, pulled off all…

Short Story

LARA CROFT FUCKS A MERCENARY

This isn’t about me or my desire. This is about Lara Croft’s breasts, and how the advanced graphics of 2006 meant they glistened after she came out of the…

Short Story

THE FALL OF EROS

  He should never have looked. And he hadn’t intended to look. His plan had been to stay away from that bloody warzone as much as possible. As they’d…

Tentacular Thinking

Transgressive Intimacy

New York, 1900. A nurse from the Knickerbocker hospital arrives on her bike. Her agile, freely moving yet uniformed body seems to merge with the city architecture. One of…

Short Story

SIGNS

  Between the museum and the main road into the city, there is this lost piece of garden. Chairs stand on the grass, which do not belong with anything else.

Short Story

SHADOWLAND AND MELON PLANT

The button for the large sunbathing area on the roof is worn, half of the S is gone. I press three buttons lower. The number is red to…

Short Story

GIANNA IN ARCADIA

  First day Waited too long. She got up and then I was too late. Not even a look. Just as well. Maybe tomorrow.

Short Story

SCHAUMAINKAI

  The client he had been working with these past few weeks was a nuisance. It was a big company, and there was a lot at stake.

Short Story

THE SIGH

A watery springtime sun waves over the word ‘Oryctolagus cuniculus’ when suddenly I feel it: eyes staring at the back of my head. I cautiously look up from…

Short Story

BEHIND THE WALL

  She slaps me with the flat of her hand. My cheek blazes, she rests her hand on it and then gently strokes her fingers towards my…

Commissioned Visual Contribution

Karel Martens

  A selection of portraits from the digital guest book, collected during the exhibition ‘Karel Martens: Still Moving’ at Platform-L in Seoul from 08-10-2018 to 14-02-2019.  …

Short Story

INNARDS

  Everything about him was slender and pointed, he had been bred that way, aerodynamic, a racing dog. Although he did not move slowly, not slowly at all,…

Short Story

THE SLUG

  The ribbed edge upon which it moves glistens with slime. You’d like to take a lick of it with your tongue. Looking at it makes you shiver, a…

Short Story

VAN OORSCHOT

  Simon looks out of the window. He has turned the chair around halfway, the chair where, very occasionally, a client sits and waits. He does his…

Short Story

HER MAN IS OUT

  As soon as I walk into the park, I see him. Like me, he is early. I take a quick look, half-hidden between a tree and…

Short Story

MARZIPAN

  Inside my coat pocket, there was the piece of cake wrapped in cellophane, which I crushed the moment I saw him. I was coming from a…

Short Story

OFF THE CUFF

  Leila walks along the wide pavement that leads in a straight line past the park to the sea. It’s evening, January. Obviously she’s not going swimming, she…

Short Story

GRASS

  Rippling rivers of light. Street lanterns reflected in shiny paintwork. A familiar click, the car locking shut. The softly fading rumble of an engine cooling off. Standing beside…

Short Story

HOTEL LE JARDIN

  She looks around the room where they will have breakfast the next morning, amazed by the gilt-framed paintings of scarcely clad women on the pinkish-purple walls.

Short Story

NEWARK

  She wasn’t lonely. That wasn’t why she did it. It was the heat, instead, as well as the dirt of the city accumulating in the folds…

Short Story

RELAX, PLEASE

  I’ve come at the most expensive hotel in the city for a massage. In the spacious dressing room I find my bathrobe and a pair of slippers, both…

Short Story

AROUND THE CORNER

  The balding guy at the counter speaks English. Of course he does, I suspect I’m the first Dutch guest in a very long time. I reply in English,…

Short Story

ADIEU, WESTCORD

They’re in bed. Harpie and a man called Stefan, as far as she knows. Through a slightly open window they can hear the cars on the motorway down…

Short Story

‘SAY YES’

  She stands on stage, sweating, struggling through her presentation. She’s been giving the same talk night after night, and she’s hearing herself speak as if from a distance.

Short Story

THE DEVELOPER

  So he arrives at work on Monday morning, gets a coffee downstairs while his computer starts up, and opens his mailbox. He checked his messages before going to…

Short Story

A ROOM FOR TWO

  Vincent was a war correspondent. Sporting greasy black hair, a dimple in the three-day stubble on his chin, a closed-up hole in his ear lobe where he once…

Short Story

DORA KNOWS MORE

  When I returned to the city, when the trees put their foliage on full display and small animals emerged from their burrows and nests for us to greet…

Short Story

LAVA

  ‘Rafael Angel Uribe Serna, lawyer.’ Once I’ve checked in, the doors that are mostly meant to let no one out open to let me in. I know…

Short Story

ENCOUNTER

The room is freezing cold, and reeks of testosterone. There’s loud techno thumping away, in a rhythm that makes me feel even more restless than I felt…

Short Story

EXIT 22

  She’d already rung the bell a few times, and when she got upstairs she said she was sick and tired of having to keep climbing the…

Short Story

THE LUXURY OF THE VOYEUR

My feelings for you bordered on the uncontrollable. I thrive best where the boundary between allowing and rejecting becomes porous. I never begged you for anything, our…

Short Story

LETTER TO H.

  Sorry to keep you waiting so long. A letter involves a kind of letting-go that sex calls for, I thought, and then without realising it I became wary…

Short Story

‘G’

    In writing you, calm, proud G., I see your cropped hair, following the curves of your skull, your shoulder blades, the dotted line of your…

Short Story

ALLEYS OF DESIRE

  The rattling sound of my wheeled suitcase echoes across the canal in the Amsterdam night. Apart from the occasional drunken cyclist, the city centre is deserted.

Some Thoughts On...

Cruising for Discretion

One of the most common aliases for poppers is ‘video head cleaner’, for some reason. fig 1: Rush is a room odorizer Poppers are the now pretty…

Short Story

BOSTINI

  They’d spent the whole afternoon in bed in his sweaty attic room. The sun poured its rays straight through the roof as they French-kissed with the seedy horniness…

Short Story

SYSTEMIC BREAKDOWN

Usually I’m woken by Tom’s voice tickling my ear. ‘Morning Isa, slept well?’ He always sounds as if he’s also only just woken up – still a…

Short Story

THE PROMISE OF A WOMAN

  E: You coming? A: Why’ve you gone to bed so early? Don’t you feel well? E: Well, I thought… A: Are you really tired…

Short Story

CRAZY EYES

 There’s never any warning. Perhaps that’s part of the deal, me not expecting it. Like you can’t have…

Portfolio

Sam Samiee
Portfolio

Melanie Bonajo
Some Thoughts On...

Trendy Pornography

Trendy Pornography character set fig 1: By typing the ‘a’ an image of three women in a tiled room appears; one woman cups the breasts of another from behind,…

Musings

Bodies Electric

Long before any scientific knowledge about electricity existed, people were very well aware of shocks as well as they were witnesses to the sparkling lightning bolts thundering through…

Short Story

Madame Clic Clac

Out of a vague sense that she had crossed my path in order to make something happen, and without being able to pinpoint what would happen, why it would…

Portfolio

Petrovsky & Ramone
Portfolio

Hamid El Kanbouhi
Short Story

The Sex Shop

On average working in the sex shop had become a surprisingly mundane experience. Initially the excitement of entering such a different world than the one he was used to…

Portfolio

Aram Tanis
Portfolio

David Haines

Encounter

Walking

Visit

  • Florist

Gerda’s Bloemen

Runstraat 16, 1016GK, Amsterdamfacebook.com/Gerdas-Bloemen-583861271629386/
  • Florist

Pompon

Prinsengracht 8-10, 1015DV, Amsterdampompon.nl
  • Club

Radion

Louwesweg 1, 1066EA, Amsterdamradionamsterdam.nl
  • Club

ot301

Overtoom 301, 1054HW, Amsterdamot301.nl
  • Club

De School

Dr. Jan van Breemenstraat 1, 1056AB, Amsterdamdeschoolamsterdam.nl
  • Bar

Doka

Volkshotel, Wibautstraat 150, 1091GR, Amsterdamvolkshotel.nl/doka
  • Bar

Butcher’s Tears

Karperweg 45, 1075LB, Amsterdambutchers-tears.com