‘What becomes important for me is to think about ourselves not only as individuals, which is what memoirs are typically supposed to deal with, but as people who are caught up in history.’
Arjuna Keshvani-Ham interviews Viet Thanh Nguyên.
Fiction | Here it Was, the Start of Life by Harriet Armstrong
‘I wanted to learn something that would shock me, something that came from someplace very far outside of myself. I was tired of learning things I could have pulled out of my own mind very easily and passively.’
New fiction by Harriet Armstrong.
Poetry | Aspiration by Kevin Graham
‘We talk lightly as if we know the outcome / of things, the floor of knowledge // an oily ghost that leaves me when they shift / gears into medical jargon.’
Winning poem from The London Magazine Poetry Prize 2025.
Essay | Rough Comforts by Richie Jones
‘Twenty-nine Jack Reacher novels and counting. What does it require of the reader to make it through every headbutt of every book? What does it say about me that I have read them all? What does it say of the writer of twenty-nine Jack Reacher novels?’
Richie Jones on Lee Child’s Jack Reacher franchise.
Essay | Down the Rabbit Hole by Helena C. Aeberli
‘Even as we seek to relegate stories of witches, wonders and monsters to an absurd and irrational past, we’re drawn to retelling and retelling them.’
Helena C. Aeberli on Mary Toft, TikTok and ‘micro-histories’.
Essay | Staying Mute by Sara Ahmad
‘If a Brazilian electrician, pursued by the police as a result of a series of blunders, can be shot in cold blood in front of the British public – how thin is the membrane separating victim and terrorist?’
Sarah Ahmad on the 7/7 bombings, 20 years on.
Fiction | Duchess by Gráinne O’Hare
‘When I passed the baby to her to hold, she did so with the bored detachment of a taxi driver holding a name card at an airport.’
New short fiction by Gráinne O’Hare.
Essay | Exile City by Kasra Lang
‘If the city makes no offers of belonging, it makes no demands either, unlike in America, which insists on a daily pledge of allegiance. In that sense London is the exile city par excellence.’
Kasra Lang’s essay on Joseph Conrad and Hisham Matar.
Fiction | My Secession by JL Bogenschneider
‘It took years – time, distance and eventually death – before I even approached a comprehension of my father, and of course, in lieu of any verification on his part, it could only ever be speculation. Still, and but so, I tried.’
Short fiction by JL Bogenschneider.
Fiction | Still Life with Neighbours by Eddie Creamer
‘It was as if I was being allowed an insight into the very core of their lives, and I felt closer to them than to the people I actually lived with.’
Short fiction by Eddie Creamer, runner up in The London Magazine Short Story Prize 2024.
Review | Becoming a Two by Lucy Thynne
‘In the diaries’ dailiness, they allow for capaciousness, an expression – as with a regular routine of writing – of a relationship’s good days and bad.’
Lucy Thynne reviews Helen Garner’s Collected Diaries.
Poetry | Realism by Jo Bratten
‘Let’s talk about our terrible / childhoods, I say. Over tiramisu, Chekhov asks me to marry him / and I say yes, of course.’
New poetry by Jo Bratten.
Fiction | Heat Signature by Idra Novey
‘In my calculations for our one-year stay here, I didn’t consider whether the layered emotional outfits I’ve assembled for my parenting persona in Rio might not fit here.’
Short fiction by Idra Novey.
Essay | Cusk, Experimentalism and the Limits of Autofiction by Zuhri James
‘For all its claims to fluid, amorphous prose untethered to plot and traditional character development, autofiction – and herein lies the irony – remains firmly representational, if not entirely conventional.’
Zuhri James on Rachel Cusk and autofiction.
Poetry | Aphorisms on Poetry by Lee Seong-Bok
‘Because poetry must use language, which is inherently opaque and unstable, it has to be more precise than mathematics. For poets, there is no higher morality than precision.’
Lee Seong-Bok on poetry.
Review | ‘They, too, are singular’: On Twins by Nicola Healey
‘Viney’s exhaustive and detailed study, encompassing the uses of twins in myth, literature, art and science, searches for ‘how twins fulfil and defy these and other expectations’.
Nicola Healey reviews Twinkind: The Singular Significance of Twins by William Viney.
Review | Eyes that Have Seen by Sylee Gore
‘The defining sensibility of Cole’s visual argot is a timeless ephemerality. His photographs twin the incidental with a profound belief in beauty.’
Sylee Gore reviews Pharmakon by Teju Cole.
Review | Suspensions of Disbelief by Stuart Walton
‘Eire’s aim in this capacious, deeply researched and often perplexing book is to account for episodes of the miraculous from a historian’s perspective, seen through the retrospective lens of what has become known, if not universally, as the post-secular age.’
Stuart Walton reviews They Flew: A History of the Impossible by Carlos Eire.
Review | Belonging to the Dead by Gary Kaill
‘Two recently published novels embrace ‘death is not the end’ as both axiom and narrative foundation stone, and traverse the great beyond to dizzying effect.’
Gary Kaill reviews The Earth is Falling by Carmen Pellegrino & It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over, Anne de Marcken.
Review | Bolaño’s Exquisite Corpse by Tommy Gilhooly
‘The short stories in this collection cannot, therefore, be read as lesser examples of Bolaño’s novels.’
Tommy Gilhooly on The Collected Stories of Roberto Bolaño.
Review | War and Peace? by Luke Warde
‘There is much in War that compels, especially what it reveals about Céline’s incipient, and already grim, worldview.’
Luke Warde reviews ‘War’.
Essay | Evading Capture: On Writing Two Experimental Memoirs by Jen Calleja
‘There can be many different ‘correct’ translations of the same text: I think that we each have not only multiple stories we can tell about our lives, but many forms for them, too.’
Jen Calleja on writing experimental memoir.
Poetry | Two Poems by Miruna Fulgeanu
‘Yes I understand the world; it doesn’t mean I want / to do it. It’s hard!’
Two poems by Miruna Fulgeanu.
Fiction | Reasons for Not Speaking by Amaan Hyder
‘But these are not just white people, these are queer people. And what is that supposed to mean? Is queer some reliable thing?’
Short fiction by Amaan Hyder, winner of The London Magazine Short Story Prize 2024.