‘The central achievement of Doom Painting is not to show how the past has shaped us (an obvious enough move for any historical novelist), but rather to emphasise how far the present lives within the past.’
Joseph Williams reviews Doom Painting.
I Remind Myself by Jane Hirshfield
‘Everywhere beings who worry, who notice birthdays, who war. / And still, existence’s single dice-throw – / the wish to go on, over not.’
Poetry by Jane Hirshfield.
Puking Abadan: Dylan Thomas in Iran by Kasra Lang
‘Thomas spends much of his letters from Iran begging his wife to forgive his various infidelities. What’s sometimes lost in this personal story is that he had arrived in Iran at an extraordinary time, a period of high intrigue not only in the country’s history but in the wider drama of the twentieth century.’
Kasra Lang on Dylan Thomas’s 1951 trip to Iran.
Protected: October / November 2026 Digital Issue
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Comfort and Its Discontents by Devki Panchmatia
‘While it must be stressed that Rankine’s lyric practice is capacious and stylistically thrilling, that her insights are always valuable in isolation, I am left slightly unsure of what Triage’s greater intentions are.’
Devki Panchmatia on Claudia Rankine.
The Scale Against Poetry: Tony Harrison’s Prose by Dane Holt
‘Partly due to critical neglect, partly due to the single-minded determination to be a poet who survived on nothing but his poetry, Harrison’s prose is doomed to be a footnote in his career.’
Dane Holt on Tony Harrison’s underappreciated prose.
It’s a Devil of a Gap by Alex Niven
‘Might there be something, beyond backwater nihilism, in the vanishing of the Tree at Sycamore Gap that speaks to us about a country increasingly unable to protect its social and civic structures in the most basic ways?’
Alex Niven on the Sycamore Gap and cycles of decline.
August / September 2026 Issue
For digital subscribers, access the August / September 2026 issue here, including poetry by Nobel Prize winner Wisława Szymborska and Forward Prize winner Leontia Flynn, Alex Niven on the Sycamore Gap Tree and reviews of new work by Julian Barnes, Claudia Rankine and Adrian Duncan.
The New Religious Radicals by Martín Francisco Saps
‘Growing up in suburban Chicago, I was often told that there were two topics I should never raise with strangers: politics and religion. This was a time where secular individualism was the ultimate marker of freedom.’
Martín Francisco Saps on the rise of a new religious politics.
Helen When Asked by Nina Reljić
‘My face was not the most beautiful / but any person was entitled to think it was / and what terrifying pleasure in that.’
Nina Reljić’s winning poem in this year’s Poetry Prize.
A Very British Revolt by John Merrick
‘Britain, whoever is in power, is a small-c conservative place.’
John Merrick on the 1926 General Strike.
A 2026 Survey of Poets
Sixty-four years on from the original survey, The London Magazine speaks to fifteen poets, including Jorie Graham, Don Paterson, A. E. Stallings and more, about the state of contemporary poetry.
June / July 2026 Issue
For digital subscribers, access the June / July 2026 issue here, including the winning poems from this year’s Poetry Prize, as well as new work by Nick Laird and Lawrence Osborne, and The London Magazine’s 2026 Survey of Poets with responses from Jorie Graham, Don Paterson, A. E. Stallings and more.
Essay | Imaging the Invisible by Oriol Ponsatí-Murlà
‘When something like this happens then the image isn’t merely a banal transposition of reality. It creates a certain reality, of a very particular character, because it has the capacity to go beyond itself. To transcend itself.’
Oriol Ponsatí-Murlà on the advent of photography and documenting the dead.
Fiction | On Not Knowing English by Sergi Pàmies
‘I distract myself with the idea that human beings can be divided into two categories: those who wait, and those who make others wait. If forced to, I’d describe myself as one of those who wait.’
Short fiction by Sergi Pàmies.
Essay | Flags Made in China by Marina Garcés
‘If we take a closer look at them, flags don’t express the eternal identity of nations but the power relations upon which today’s nation states have been constructed and consolidated.’
Marina Garcés on Catalan flags and nation states.
Essay | Ophrys, or Of Seduction by Alicia Kopf
‘Modern biology strengthens what Darwin already noted: nature experiments constantly with sex and gender, without being reduced to any single pattern.’
Alicia Kopf on Darwin, sexual selection and orchids.
Protected: Catalan Issue 2026
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Review | Under Laboratory Conditions by Joseph Williams
‘History in Minor Black Figures is not so much a ‘vaster social context’ than something to be looked at, discussed and then turned away from. Like a painting, or a petri dish.’
Joseph Williams reviews Brandon Taylor’s Minor Black Figures.
Essay | Inside the Vanishing Point by Zoe Guttenplan
‘It seems as though we have gone through the painting and are living inside the vanishing point: creating the means of our own self-effacement, using them, bemoaning their existence and continuing to use them anyway.’
Zoe Guttenplan on invisible media, AI and the age of sameness.
Fiction | Dogelon Mars by Adrian Nathan West
‘In his own life, money had been nearly but never wholly absent, manifested in quantities of just-barely- and almost-enough.’
Short fiction by Adrian Nathan West.
Poetry | Time Management by Nasim Luczaj
‘So what that it was okay to call it / a day? Does delight ever feel done? And hell / will come, whether or not you schedule it.’
New poetry by Nasim Luczaj.
Poetry | The Erymanthian Boar by Rachel Curzon
‘We’re going now, I said, // to say something definite. / And when the car began its song / the street sang it back, // all lamentation.’
New poetry by Rachel Curzon.