‘What are you doing forever is how he asked me to marry him. It was three weeks into our togetherness though we had been friends for over a year. How do you go on without that sort of love?’
The London Magazine’s guide to five of the capital’s best cultural events and shows this October: art, theatre, literature and more.
‘Quite shortly the English pub will be extinct, part of history. The trouble is that the wretched brewers, in their hurry to find a modern equivalent of the traditional interior, neither stop to think nor to find proper architects and designers.’
Stephen Gardiner on the state of that bastion of so-called English cultural activity, the pub.
‘I think my overwhelming feeling writing that poem and reading it out now is one of ‘trappedness’. Anger at being trapped in the world, in a situation which makes no sense, with faculties that cannot make sense of it. The other question is why?’
Shoshana Kessler speaks to poet and editor, Camille Ralphs.
‘When so many bad things have happened to someone, they are automatically a good person. You have to be nice to them. Their misfortune creates a magnetic field of deflection.’
New Fiction by Emily Waugh.
‘Poetry is always trying to capture the experience of living a human life, which is an impossible task. Poets come close, but of course, always fail. Life is simply too complicated, too individual, too big. But the best poets, in my opinion, are the ones who manage to conjure feeling and keep mystery. And, of course, sprinkle in some humour to not take the whole thing too seriously.’
The third in our Forward Prize for Poetry interview series, Leyla Josephine and Michael Pederson.
‘The Palestinian people have been dealing with variable, accelerating modes of their erasure and absenting in English for nearly a century now. I had to write this book.’
The second in our Forward Prizes for Poetry interview series, Fady Joudah and Sarah Wimbush speak to each other about their collections, […] and STRIKE.
‘Like many nuns, she was a great talker; a chatterbox, she would have said. It was important, she had always told me, to keep cheerful in any adversity; the platitudes that sustained her had curiously little to do with any religion.’
Short Fiction by Hilary Mantel.
‘Tanet is trying to write something that can’t be so immediately defined, somewhere between a true-story narrative – without the exploitative pitfalls of the genre – and a child’s fantasy story with real-world consequences.’
Esmee Wright reviews Untold Lessons by Maddalena Vaglio Tanet.
‘Both women are potters who haven’t made anything, and both women become disillusioned by the empty promise of an artistic career.’
Anna de Vivo reviews Hannah Regel’s The Last Sane Woman.
‘It made sense to me that the theme of sex centres itself in my books about refugees, because when people flee from wars, they often leave with few belongings and sometimes without their families. So, in exile, surrounded by loneliness and scarcity, their bodies become a focal point.’
Olivia Boyle talks to Sulaiman Addonia.
‘For the grass to reach the mirror, you cannot be proximate. / It is generous. Both of us, almost missing. / We seem not to go or stay.’
Two poems by Tim Tim Cheng.
‘My job, when talking to my daughter, is to guess what she means, her job is to guess what I mean. We believe things about each other. But how do we have a concept of meaning before we have a whole language? When does an infant have a meaningful sense of meaning?’
Hugh Foley on Taylor Swift, Chat GPT and the broader uses and abuses of meaning.
‘Conversations around her work centre on her significant success, her Marxist politics, but rarely her technique. Rooney’s critics seem reluctant to talk about her sentences, which is unfortunate, because the sentences are very good.’
Hester Styles Vickery reviews Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo.
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‘What are you doing forever is how he asked me to marry him. It was three weeks into our togetherness though we had been friends for over a year. How do you go on without that sort of love?’
The London Magazine’s guide to five of the capital’s best cultural events and shows this October: art, theatre, literature and more.
‘Quite shortly the English pub will be extinct, part of history. The trouble is that the wretched brewers, in their hurry to find a modern equivalent of the traditional interior, neither stop to think nor to find proper architects and designers.’
Stephen Gardiner on the state of that bastion of so-called English cultural activity, the pub.
‘I think my overwhelming feeling writing that poem and reading it out now is one of ‘trappedness’. Anger at being trapped in the world, in a situation which makes no sense, with faculties that cannot make sense of it. The other question is why?’
Shoshana Kessler speaks to poet and editor, Camille Ralphs.
The London Magazine has a publication history spanning almost three hundred years, and has featured work by some of the most prominent names in literature, from John Keats to Hilary Mantel. In this curated selection, we share our favourite pieces from the TLM archive.
‘Quite shortly the English pub will be extinct, part of history. The trouble is that the wretched brewers, in their hurry to find a modern equivalent of the traditional interior, neither stop to think nor to find proper architects and designers.’
Stephen Gardiner on the state of that bastion of so-called English cultural activity, the pub.
‘Like many nuns, she was a great talker; a chatterbox, she would have said. It was important, she had always told me, to keep cheerful in any adversity; the platitudes that sustained her had curiously little to do with any religion.’
Short Fiction by Hilary Mantel.
‘The market in femininity being such, how could one hope to see any male foragers? Only old and broken husbands were sometimes to be seen towed towards an Issa store advertising free-port prices.’
Fiction by Graham Greene.
‘The Beatles are good even though everyone knows they’re good, i.e. in spite of those claims of the Under Thirties about their filling a new sociological need like Civil Rights and LSD. Our need for them is neither sociological nor new, but artistic and old, specifically a renewal, a renewal of pleasure.’
Ned Rorem on The Beatles. Originally published in the February 1968 edition of The London Magazine.
‘Now I’m almost afraid of all the once-necessary artifices and obscurities, and can’t, for the life or the death of me, get any real liberation, any diffusion or dilution or anything, into the churning bulk of the words.’
A letter from Dylan Thomas to Vernon Watkins.
‘Having in recent years become saturated with criminal history, what strikes me most about that particular occasion is that all the principal guests were in one way or another involved with murderers.’
Essay by Rayner Heppenstall
‘They could easily have filled up at Mammoth Junction. He switched on the long beams, but even then the little cave of light moving ahead of them seemed no match for the dark battalions of surrounding pines.’
Fiction by Sylvia Plath.
‘The petition has been refused,’ he announced. ‘You may go.’
Fiction by Franz Kafka.
‘They passed away into the long eclipse,
Like voices on the wandering breezes blown
Now here – now gone – but whither, all unknown.’
Poetry from A. E. Housman.
‘Inscrutable, / Below shoulders not once / Seen by any man who kept his head, / You defy questions / You defy other godhood.’
Poetry by Sylvia Plath.
