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Editorial

Creature Discomforts

by “Adam”

Two hundred years ago this very year, I was born from the imaginings of a teenage girl called Mary. Suggestive, no? My genesis was strange indeed. My mother, if I may call her that, and her married lover (a small-time composer of doggerel called Percy Bysshe Shelley) had a baby daughter who, tragically, died after just a few days. One stormy evening not long thereafter, my mother took part in a storytelling contest with her friends. During the course of it, she conceived me.

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