‘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.
Essay | Bagel City by Hugh Foley
‘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.
Review | Formal People by Hester Styles Vickery
‘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.
Review | A Competition Without Rules by Guy Stagg
‘O’Neill’s true target in Godwin is not the excesses and abuses of the modern football industry, but the little lies with which the characters serving that system justify their crimes.’
Guy Stagg reviews Godwin.
Essay | When Speech Was Speech by Kira McPherson
‘Focusing on speech marks alone overlooks what novels can do in their absence. What if ambiguity is the point?’
Kira McPherson on speech marks, or lack thereof.
Essay | Meat Space by Hugh Foley
‘Ultimately, I think, in this moment, the body doesn’t matter. It’s just another thing to upload onto the cloud. Or rather, it matters because it’s the ultimate thing to upload. The realest thing.’
Hugh Foley on bodybuilding influencers.
Fiction | Consultation by Leeor Ohayon
‘He told me to come round, said this time he wanted to watch me with others.’
Fiction by Leeor Ohayon.
Essay | Tory Britain’s Literary Post-Mortem by Katie Tobin
‘In the time that has lapsed between Evenings and Weekends’ period setting and today, the world has been rocked by a global pandemic, and seen Britain usher in four new Prime Ministers, one of whom was outlasted by a Tesco lettuce.’
Katie Tobin on austerity’s literary legacy.
Poetry | Two Poems by James Appleby
‘I’ll be young with you still. One stroke of pen / cancels a decade: our unfaithful room / evicts new tenants, guts our suitcases.’
Two poems by James Appleby.
Essay | Voice Memories by Ian Wang
‘They are less interviews than they are extended passages of domestic caterwauling. A sound editor would have an aneurysm.’
Ian Wang on voice memories.
Review | Blue Correspondents by Oluwaseun Olayiwola
‘For all the shagginess of its visual form, from the actor’s remarkable ability to clip presence from scene to scene, to the visual grandeur of the stage’s concomitant nuts and bolts, it is a suave progression of circumstance and feeling.’
Oluwaseun Olayiwola reviews Bluets at the Royal Court Theatre.
Reviews | Kafka’s Sentence by Jack Barron
‘Just as there are good and bad interpretations, there are simply good and bad misinterpretations, and discriminating between them is the key to seeing Kafka’s obscurity clearly. ‘The Metamorphosis’ is as much about unimaginability as it is boundlessly applicable allegory.’
Jack Barron reviews Kafka’s Diaries and Metamorphoses: In Search of Franz Kafka.
Fiction | Request for a More Complete Obituary by Viken Berberian
‘‘I was tired of being the other,’ you said during one of our Scrabble games. ‘You know, these days they even discriminate against bald, clean-shaven white men with weird- sounding names. Well, I am not exotic. I am exhausted.’’
New fiction by Viken Berberian.
Essay | Literary Professionals and Other Mythical Creatures by Fernando Sdrigotti
‘To insist on seeing writing as a profession is both delusional and symptomatic of the LinkedInfication of everyday life – that very neoliberal desire to establish hierarchies between culture producers: the pros and the amateurs. This validation-seeking division is senseless, for what’s so wrong with amateurism?’
Fernando Sdrigotti on Literary Professionals.
Interview | ‘One word after another’: A Conversation with Hugo Williams by Jamie Cameron
‘‘God, it’s a good job though isn’t it?’ Hugo offers. I tell him I feel the same way. We both agreed: you can’t beat it.’
Jamie Cameron in conversation with Hugo Williams.
Review | Literary Posters: The Birth of an American Visual Culture by Louis Harnett O’Meara
‘This was the fate of the literary poster; brief but seminal, its visual motifs, techniques and advertising innovations were quickly absorbed into new mediums.’
Louis Harnett O’Meara on The Art of the Literary Poster.
Review | Pulling a Stunt by Lucy Thynne
‘‘In this meeting of darkness and light,’ Cusk writes, ‘was a beginning.’’
Lucy Thynne reviews Parade.
Fiction | There or Not There by Claire Carroll
‘He said if he had done it, then that person would have almost certainly drowned, and he’d be a murderer.’
New fiction from Claire Carroll.
Review | The Spirit of the Times by Patrick Cash
‘A very physical and evocative portrayal of the town is built, even if a more beautiful story perhaps hides in its shadows.’
Patrick Cash reviews Pity and The Night Alphabet.
Essay | The Secret Earth by Charlotte Stroud
‘It is for this reason that I never go to my field at this time of day but wait instead until I can be alone. Only then, in my experience, will it show me a secret.’
Charlotte Stroud on the secrets of the countryside.
Review | Capote and the Treachery of the Decade by Hallam Bullock
‘As with all tortured artists, we are often more comfortable recoiling at their wounds than considering them.’
Hallam Bullock on Answered Prayers and Capote’s Women.
Review | The Brightness of a Single Instance by Hannah Hutchings-Georgiou
‘Kneeling in peace or protest, Ono asks us to pick up the scissors, the pen or the match so as to creatively strike out, seek peace and light up the dark.’
Hannah Hutchings-Georgiou reviews Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind.
Fiction | A Brief History of Dogs in Barcelona by Kieran Wyatt
‘I noticed she had listed three options. To hurt her. To get her attention. To make a point. I remembered learning about the rule of three at school, and I realised that it was probably a universal thing – or maybe she only used three examples when she spoke English.’
New fiction by Kieran Wyatt.
Fiction | Sump by Sheila Armstrong
‘When you are unhappy wherever you go, the common denominator is you, Teddy’s ex-girlfriend told him, with a cruelty so uncharacteristic as to be true.’
New fiction by Sheila Armstrong.