Today we will make contact with Flo and I am giddy with excitement. I did not sleep in the night. My mind fussed over details of the day ahead: the food preparation, Gustav’s mocha birthday cake that must be collected in the morning from the baker’s. But mostly, I could not stop thinking of Flo. What will I say to my dear friend after these eighteen months of separation? How is the afterlife treating you? What’s it like to be without a body? Met anyone nice? […]
Poetry | The Great Disappointment & Living Without Moon by Ali Lewis
‘Leadership is disappointing your own people at a rate they can absorb.’ – Ronald Heifetz. Since I’ve been reckoning with grief / I’ve been looking for a painting I remember / of a peasant, miserable on a hillside, / seconds after his rapture hasn’t come, / his plough already sold to a neighbour / for a song as a show of faith and a joke / to crack in paradise. But the closest […]
Fiction | Ocean Drive by Elsa Court
Elsa Court Ocean Drive It was already morning and time to put on a pair of shorts. But, like an…
Essay | Moments of Freedom by Caleb Azumah Nelson
In the summer of 2017, I heard Arthur Jafa give a talk at the Serpentine Pavilion. He opened with music, playing chopped and screwed versions of Frank Ocean and Jay Z. His words themselves were like sing-song, a darting, undulating rhythm. And the anchor: Music is the only space where Black people don’t have to be marginal. Most, if not all of my work, is concerned with freedom – of expression, of the personhood, of Black people – so these words resonated […]
Poetry | Pit Lullaby by Jessica Traynor
When we turn off the light and I hold you close / my vision splinters, a mirror that catches / what light there is, throws it back as an untruth. / We are so close to each other here / that full faces never form – just a wisp of hair / settling on a cheek, an eyebrow like a capstone
Poetry | chalcot square by Charlie Baylis
words appear / on the walls / great lakes strung from her fingers / builders vomiting multicoloured glitter over gravel / the grass bends back / lacing the ditches with dull green / from where we admire / ponds full of nothing
Essay | Paris on the Page by Jude Cook
‘We’ll always have Paris,’ as Bogart famously drawled to Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca, alluding both to their own affair and the city’s enduring quality of romantic vivacity; its embodiment of Eros versus the forces of Thanatos, in this case represented by the Second World War. He doesn’t have to elaborate on what Paris symbolises; its superabundance of light and love, its promise of amorous adventure. Not many cities are so neatly metonymic. Yet the title […]
Fiction | Coming Up for Air by Sarah Leipciger
I was still alive when I was pulled from the black water. The batelier who hauled me out slapped my face once or twice and, when he got no response, assumed I was dead. I seemed dead, and anyway moments later, I was. Besides, he wouldn’t have been able to resuscitate me had he known there was still a beat to […]
Essay | A Life of Purpose and Pleasure by Madeleine Feeny
Born in 1911 in Berlin to a ‘hopelessly incompatible’ couple – a withdrawn, eccentric Bavarian baron and a vivacious, intelligent beauty – Sybilla von Schoenebeck would live to ninety-four, dying in London in 2006 under another name. Writer, bon viveur, lover, friend, she would be subject to the vicissitudes of twentieth-century politics, her writing shaped by her knack for survival. She endured abandonment, loss, exile, fascism and war – yet through it all, she never lost her […]
Poetry | Water Birth by Rachel Bower
No-one wants to be born at sea / but I’m a midwife, squeeze my hand, / that’s it, we’ve got this girl. / She squats, not time to push / yet. Bile rises with the swell. Breathe / through the surge, keep your head. / The baby’s well positioned, head / down, curled and smooth like a sea- / sucked pebble. That’s it, keep breathing, / squeeze those ice packs in your hands, / let’s cool the bruises down. I push / hair from her eyes, scrap of a girl […]
Review | Existential Blows by Jonathan McAloon
Time and the novelist both have death within their gift. In the GermanAustrian writer Daniel Kehlmann’s novel Fame, translated into English ten years ago, an elderly woman begs and bargains for her life. Rosalie has terminal cancer, and exists within a short story by the fictional author Leo Richter. Richter, also a creator of dense metafictions, lives in Kehlmann’s novel as a character on the page, a malevolent omnipotent presence, and through extracts of his work […]
Poetry | Write It by Helen Mort
Because I can’t, a rat redrafts the lower reaches / of our house at night, cursive across high ledges, / forcing the bright idea of its body through masonry / to trace the lines of copper pipes. A huge buck, / gnawing plastic, caches of cat food, grazing on lintels. / With slivers of wood, he stories his kind: […]
Fiction | The Operated Englishman by Alex Pheby
It’s going to test our collective patience, but I’d like to take some time to talk about – I suppose eulogise – my old friend Gary ‘Little’ England(-er). As much as I’m able to, of course – he was so much more complicated than I could ever claim to be. It would take a real writer, an actor, an artist, a doctor, a fashion designer and probably a psychoanalyst all-in-one to do Gary justice – the things he said, the way he walked, the things he did, who he was. I’m not quite up to it […]
Essay | Reader, You’re Late by Rebecca Watson
When I talk about the experience of writing my debut novel, I often catch myself using an authority I do not recognise. This is what I was thinking, that is how it happened. I hear the assertion, and I find myself wondering: is that true? It is not that I lie. I believe what I say. But simultaneously, I am suspicious. Remembering is a form of repaving, and the trouble is, writing is a fickle practice. Not in the writing but the memory of it. What happened in the immediate is different […]
Poetry | The Fixer by Martha Sprackland
The opening and shutting of the door / for seven years has shorted the wire / that keeps the children’s food fresh and cold. / She will have to defrost the icebox. / Whilst he swears in refrigerated goods I flip / the switches on a deluxe kettle / turn on all the deluxe gas / on my deluxe six-ring burner / plan a feast for all five of us […]
Essay | My Father’s Coat by Stephanie Sy-Quia
There is a garden here, with a yew hedge, a lavender border, peonies, a vegetable patch, herbs, and a washing line. The house is made of bricks, painted cream and, on the inside, it has big exposed beams and old, at times slanted, floors. It feels as if I’ve been lifted sideways out of my normal life and into a hyperreal painting, some potent archetype of the English imaginary, and a stability of existence which is so inconceivable to me, it is almost laughable. Until a few weeks ago […]
Essay | Preface by Matthew Scott
Samuel Beckett’s discomfiting formulation of ‘a mind like the one I always had, always on the alert against itself ’has been playing around my own mind over the past few months. To be alert to complacencies of thought is surely a good thing but Beckett’s phrase also seems to imply a mind at work against its own well-being. In my case, that quality of the mind working against itself has been a mark of this difficult period […]
Essay | The Wretched Little Place in Devonshire by Horatio Morpurgo
September 2016. On the second day of the new autumn term, a sixth former sets out from home. His bike is later found padlocked to a fence behind a church, his uniform stuffed into a binbag lying nearby. His letter to his parents arrives next day telling them where the bike is and promising not to be away for ‘longer than a year’. From his Kindle it is apparent that he has just read Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London […]
Fiction | The Bar by the Sea by Venetia Welby
Tongues. He’d always hated their lolling and poking, their insolence. Jeremy had glimpsed a quick shot of hers, pink-curled behind ageing teeth as away she went, perhaps for the last time. It was a special taunt, that this should be the last part of her to leave him. She’d be back. He felt sure of it, as he threw the espresso maker on the hob again. Only the indolent hit the bottle: who had the time to fall apart? Each evening with Patsy had felt like borrowed […]
Essay | Other Celestial Bodies by Joanna Hershon
A solar eclipse was coming. It was supposed to happen the following day or maybe the day after. I’d heard something about the store selling ‘eclipse glasses,’ but I hadn’t been paying attention. I know now that this was the first solar eclipse to be visible throughout the United States since 1918. I know now that marriage proposals and weddings were timed to occur during the eclipse. I know now that Donald Trump […]
Fiction | The Taste of Copper by Alex Christofi
The widow made her way down Ledra Street, soaking up the energy of the sun, past plastic green mermaids and a giant M made of potato chips. Tour groups stopped to take photos, bless them, while the young people chatted at tables with their frappés. On one wall, someone had graffitied a tick of the kind associated with Nike, goddess of victory, with RIOT written above it. She kept on down, past cool balconies where shadows cursed the heat. She passed old […]
Essay | A Most Sensitive and Sophisticated Mind by Sam Mills
Picture them, standing on the platform of Paddington Station in August 1913: Leonard and Virginia Woolf, suitcases by their feet, ready to board a train for a long journey. They are going on holiday to Holford, a small, pretty village in Somerset, the same place they went for their honeymoon last summer. They had a wonderful time then, enjoying country walks and sumptuous food. This time, however, I imagine Leonard struggling with his unease, tempted to abort the trip, leave the station, guide Virginia back home to their lodgings in Clifford’s Inn. For Virginia is in a vulnerable state. She has spent the last fortnight in a home in […]
Fiction | Real Life by Brandon Taylor
The other labs on the third floor of the biosciences building are empty, as if after the rapture. Strangely, it’s also not dissimilar from catching a glimpse of someone undressing when they think they are alone, the twin thrill and shame of the voyeur. The air carries the salty scent of yeast media. Wallace’s mouth waters. Below him, the atrium is filled with gauzy light. Dry yellow vines wrap around the railings, the floor glossy with wear. If he jumps, he thinks, he will plummet […]
Poetry | Schrödinger’s Black & Yard by Caleb Femi
What are you looting for? asked the evening News, & the crowd continued looting. I wasn’t there, / but I thought I was – my brazen face live on the nation’s screens, half-tucked under a t-shirt / chucking bricks. An expert on riots was invited to speak about why these particular young people / were rioting. While he talked they showed more footage: / a bus set on fire, / hooded boys with overgrown nails, / a sky that refused to bring shine nor rain / (as if it had decided […]
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