‘She felt some new horror of change impending; an end was approaching that was more a beginning; but the beginning of something already hated, far too well known.’
From 1954, short fiction by Anna Kavan.
Archive | A Last Interview with Brecht
‘In fifty years’ time, things will be different. We shall have reached a state where personality will be free.’
From 1956, an interview with Bertolt Brecht.
Archive | Shango the Shaky Fairy by Tony Harrison
‘Flushing in Shango’s honour I brood on punishment and love, and invoke his epiphany, here and now, in Britannia, bold but gentle, brave but neutral, an orisha in touch with the dead, the living and the yet to be, and with only double axes to grind.’
From 1970, Tony Harrison on Cuba and Shango.
Archive | Conversations with James Joyce
‘The most beautiful, most human traits are contained in the Odyssey. In Rome, when I had finished about half of the Portrait, I realised that the Odyssey had to be the sequel, and I began to write Ulysses.’
James Joyce in Zurich, 1917.
Interview | Aea Varfis-van Warmelo: ‘There is no such thing as a reliable narrator.’
‘There is no such thing as a reliable narrator, and efforts to achieve real truth often destroy it.’
Harriet Armstrong interviews Aea Varfis-van Warmelo.
Archive | A Letter from Marcel Proust
‘I have had a great sorrow; and my heart is not one of those that can, without a bitter pang, transpose into the past that which (be it even a mere object) was as you once were, the predilection of their present and the hope of their future.’
An unpublished letter by Marcel Proust.
Interview | ‘I don’t go to poetry to feel better’: An Interview with Victoria Chang
‘How do you write silence? That’s what I’m trying to do. How do you write death before you’ve experienced it? That’s what I’m trying to do.’
Luke Dunne interviews Victoria Chang.
Archive | The Naked by Marguerite Yourcenar
‘What am I to do? Shall I conquer an empire? Shall I build a temple? Shall I write a poem that will endure longer? The fragmentary nature of action saps my inclination to act, and every victory is merely a broken mirror in which I cannot see the whole of myself.’
From 1956, an archive piece by Marguerite Yourcenar.
Interview | Mariana Enriquez: Seven Questions
‘Why would you do that – visit cemeteries?’ is a sentiment often expressed to me, voicing some kind of disgust, as if I did something like, I don’t know, collect vomit.
Konrad Muller interviews Mariana Enriquez.
Archive | The Hitchhiking Game by Milan Kundera
‘It seemed to him that the girl he loved was a creation of his desire, his thoughts, and his faith and that the real girl now standing in front of him was hopelessly alien, hopelessly ambiguous. He hated her.’
From 1978, short fiction by Milan Kundera.
Essay | A Libidinal Legacy by Gabrielle Sicam
‘Once I knew I was writing about Crumb, I knew I wanted to write about perversion.’
Gabrielle Sicam on comics artist Robert Crumb.
Essay | Tap-dancing to the Sounds of a Machine Room by Luke Dunne
‘Cities, as Brecht depicts them, live double lives. Their inhabitants live cheek to jowl and are given to exchanging pleasantries and meaningless conversation ad nauseam.’
Luke Dunne on Bertolt Brecht’s poem ‘Of Poor B.B.’
Essay | Defanging and Radicalising Hamlet by Ira Bhattacharjee
‘Postcolonial reinterpretations do not passively inherit the political meanings embedded in Shakespeare’s text but actively produce, constrain and radicalise them according to the political realities they choose to confront – or avoid.’
Ira Bhattacharjee on Aneil Karia’s and Riz Ahmed’s Hamlet.
Archive | A Critic in Italy: An Interview with Geno Pampaloni
‘The function of the writer is to help and foster knowledge. His kind of message is not an arrow that will necessarily reach the target. Literature is an awareness of the world. It isn’t an instrument with which to change it.’
From 1976, an interview with Geno Pampaloni.
Nina Reljić wins The London Magazine Poetry Prize 2026
The judges of The London Magazine Poetry Prize 2026 award first place to Nina Reljić for her poem ‘Helen When Asked’, with second and third place awarded to Henry Woodland and Natalie Perman.
Essay | The Practical Limits of Daylight: In Memory of J. H. Prynne
‘Here, then, is the inevitable clarion call to Prynne sceptics: read, read quickly, submit to the strange music, resist the cop in your head, be persuaded to rejoice, let the healing fountain start.’
Will Fleming on J. H. Prynne.
Essay | Sylvia, the Ghost Writer by Melanie McGee Bianchi
‘If she’s tampering with me and my middlebrow money-grubbing from some supernatural plane, perhaps it’s just another chore to check off for the overachiever who once journaled, “What horrifies me most is the idea of being useless”.’
Melanie McGee Bianchi on Sylvia Plath’s guest editorship of Mademoiselle and Plath’s cult of perpetuity.
Interview | Post-Pastoral: An Interview with Zakia Sewell
‘As someone of mixed heritage, I contain or embody the oppressor and the oppressed.’
Joseph Williams interviews Zakia Sewell.
Interview | Rishi Dastidar in Conversation with Sarah Howe
‘I lean on the Clive James idea that a poem is the only art form where you can order a coffee, and even before the drink has gone cold, you could have written something that will still be read in five hundred years’ time.’
Rishi Dastidar in Conversation with Sarah Howe.
Interview | Will Self on the End of Satire, the Rise of Fascism and Writing His Own Death
‘Someone who can’t read a book cannot deliberate, cannot think and cannot conceptualise, and therefore is a threat. We couldn’t have picked a worse time to become more stupid than when we needed more intelligence.’
Alex Dommett speaks to Will Self.
Poetry | Monrovia, 2010 by Nathaniel Calhoun
‘there were war criminals around. that was / in the air. in our ice cubes. it made you feel like a decent guy.’
New poetry by Nathaniel Calhoun.
Fiction | The Overpass by Jiaqi Kang
‘All those who disappeared had to come back. Or at least, they had to announce their intention to disappear before they disappeared. Otherwise, how would anybody know?’
Awarded second place in the Brick Lane Bookshop Short Story Prize 2025, ‘The Overpass’ by Jiaqi Kang.
Poetry | Dear Dolly by Jasmine Gibbs
‘And when // they upped your dose of anaesthetic, from lucid haze to euthanasia, / it was almost a mercy.’
New poetry by Jasmine Gibbs.
Essay | The Windy Moors of Đà Lạt by Nguyễn Bình
‘Perhaps, in Wuthering Heights, Nhất Linh saw a likeness of what was happening around him: endless divisions and cycles of violence, one side propped up as the opposite of an oppressive other, only to show itself just as capable of oppression as that sworn enemy.’
Nguyễn Bình on Nhất Linh’s Vietnamese translation of Wuthering Heights.