‘Fatima subtly observes that domesticity – the unit of the family, the capitalist-defined utopia of social togetherness, of selfhood and nationhood itself – always depends on the poor who stand outside of it.’
Hannah Hutchings-Georgiou reviews ‘Is Someone There?’.
‘A deeply impressive range of stories, both in style and subject. Together they offer a picture of contemporary life in miniature.’
Benjamin Markovits on the winners of this year’s Short Story Prize.
‘To me, writing is best described as listening. And at a certain point it is as if the text is already written: it exists out there somewhere, and I just have to write it down before it disappears.’
Zadie Loft interviews Jon Fosse.
‘What purpose does realism serve? … I asked … Are images of starving children, beaten workers, brutal factory owners … realistic? Myself, I think they’re absurd.’
Short fiction by Deborah Levy.
‘Saying that fiction is untrue, that it is something of a lie, is as imprecise as saying that a song is a lie, that a joke is a lie, that a painting is a lie.’
An interview with Alejandro Zambra by Magnus Rena.
‘Arte povera and its afterlife strike me as exemplary of the fate of counter-current movements that so quickly lose their revolutionary value and are subsumed into the institutions they originally set out to critique.’
Daisy Sainsbury reviews ‘Arte Povera’.
‘Through these dolls, I aim to challenge throwaway culture and the boundaries of traditional art, encouraging a more sustainable and playful approach to creativity.’
What’s on in London this November.
‘But amid all of this, there is an undercurrent of something other.’
RC Birchley reviews Sue Harper’s ‘Blood and Coal’.
‘I love them. / I love them like history.’
This poem by Sylvia Plath originally appeared in the April 1963 edition of The London Magazine, alongside six other poems of hers.
In honour of the scariest day of the year, the team at The London Magazine share their favourite books, stories and poems in the generously-applied category of ‘spooky’ fiction, film and poetry.
Choices include works by M. R. James, Angela Carter and Niall Campbell.
‘Bill had never worried about how others received him, or his behaviour. He prioritised, instead, being as much himself as possible, for the sake of his art.’
New fiction by Charlotte Tierney.
‘In those days I had no powers against death, so I simply lay down in the least painful position to await it, while he sank into a delirium about a woman so lovely that she could pass through walls with a sigh.’
Short fiction by Gabriel García Márquez.
‘The garden is a space to think differently, to understand time differently and to understand how to cope with abundance, followed by loss, followed by abundance, followed by loss. It’s an anti-capitalist clock.’
Olivia Laing and Richard Porter in conversation with Zadie Loft.
‘The fragmented self is the self. That feeling of not being one thing but multiple threads intertwined into one physical, corporeal form, that is what it feels like to be human. I don’t think traditional portraiture where the figure is posed and sat always captures that.’
Zadie Loft speaks to gallerist and curator, Sosa Omorogbe.
‘A rich and various lunacy inspired the human race and you could almost say the greater part of his work was dealing with this lunacy.’
Short fiction by Doris Lessing.
‘I’m certainly curious about the world of men, in how they act and why. Through my fiction and my imagination, I can find the nuance, the gaps and the hollows, the contradictions.’
Selva Almada in conversation with Konrad Muller (tr. James Appleby).
‘In a world where a lot of contemporary art is consumed at the point of making and many artists are very young, we have an artist who is still with us – at 93 years old – with seven decades behind him, still drawing.’
Offer Waterman and Francis Outred discuss Frank Auerbach’s landscapes of London.
‘Blue thinks Red might be a person who dislikes even the bones of himself. That he also worries he might be missing something, or rather hopes he is, instead of believing he has broken it. Blue thinks they might be alike in that.’
New fiction by Eloise Vaughan Williams.
‘The concept of limitation definitely had a profound effect on the writing. There have been so many points in my life where I have had to recognise that there will be no resolution.’
The fourth and final in our Forward Prize for Poetry interview series, Jasmine Cooray and Kelly Michels.
‘I’ve always been in the minority, you say with defiant pride, upon reading Hippocrates’ conclusion that one third of patients get better on their own, one third don’t respond to treatment, and one third benefit from it.’
New fiction by Mimi Kawahara.
‘As I took in these surroundings, I remember feeling a sense of history and all its ages existing side by side, like the whole history of London was happening at once…’
Ben Edge’s folklore-inspired tour of London.
‘I feel that the only tip I would have to give to young short story writers is not to ask too many questions. Henry James said that we could be told too much. He feared that.’
A series of meditations on writing short stories by Brian Glanville, Elizabeth Taylor, Jonathan Raban and more.
‘What are you doing forever is how he asked me to marry him. It was three weeks into our togetherness though we had been friends for over a year. How do you go on without that sort of love?’
The London Magazine’s guide to five of the capital’s best cultural events and shows this October: art, theatre, literature and more.
‘Quite shortly the English pub will be extinct, part of history. The trouble is that the wretched brewers, in their hurry to find a modern equivalent of the traditional interior, neither stop to think nor to find proper architects and designers.’
Stephen Gardiner on the state of that bastion of so-called English cultural activity, the pub.
