‘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.
Interview | Selva Almada: Seven Questions
‘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).
Interview | Offer Waterman and Francis Outred on Auerbach’s London
‘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.
Fiction | Harbour Colours by Eloise Vaughan Williams
‘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.
Interview | Forward Prize for Best First Collection: Jasmine Cooray and Kelly Michels
‘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.
Fiction | Index of Intersecting Qualia by Mimi Kawahara
‘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.
Guide | Folklore Rising by Ben Edge
‘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.
Archive | Some Notes on Writing Stories by Brian Glanville, Elizabeth Taylor and more
‘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.
Guide | London in Five: October 2024
‘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.
Archive | The Architecture of London Pubs by Stephen Gardiner
‘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.
Interview | Between Anger and Prayer: Camille Ralphs in Conversation
‘I think my overwhelming feeling writing that poem and reading it out now is one of ‘trappedness’. Anger at being trapped in the world, in a situation which makes no sense, with faculties that cannot make sense of it. The other question is why?’
Shoshana Kessler speaks to poet and editor, Camille Ralphs.
Fiction | About Lucy by Emily Waugh
‘When so many bad things have happened to someone, they are automatically a good person. You have to be nice to them. Their misfortune creates a magnetic field of deflection.’
New Fiction by Emily Waugh.
Interview | Forward Prize for Best Single Poem Performed: Leyla Josephine and Michael Pedersen
‘Poetry is always trying to capture the experience of living a human life, which is an impossible task. Poets come close, but of course, always fail. Life is simply too complicated, too individual, too big. But the best poets, in my opinion, are the ones who manage to conjure feeling and keep mystery. And, of course, sprinkle in some humour to not take the whole thing too seriously.’
The third in our Forward Prize for Poetry interview series, Leyla Josephine and Michael Pedersen.
Interview | Forward Prize for Best Collection: Fady Joudah and Sarah Wimbush
‘The Palestinian people have been dealing with variable, accelerating modes of their erasure and absenting in English for nearly a century now. I had to write this book.’
The second in our Forward Prizes for Poetry interview series, Fady Joudah and Sarah Wimbush speak to each other about their collections, […] and STRIKE.
Poetry | Of the Death of Brutus by Graham Allison
‘No sudden catastrophe; witness / years of crumbling stone, / rotting libraries, addled brains.’
New poetry by Graham Allison.
Archive | A Dying Breed by Hilary Mantel
‘Like many nuns, she was a great talker; a chatterbox, she would have said. It was important, she had always told me, to keep cheerful in any adversity; the platitudes that sustained her had curiously little to do with any religion.’
Short fiction by Hilary Mantel.
Fiction | Medusa of the Roses [Extract] by Navid Sinaki
‘I squeeze an orange to your mouth. You used to boil them to remove the bitterness from their skin. On a dare, you drank the liquid they left behind, all pith, just to impress me.’
New fiction by Navid Sinaki.
Review | Dreamland Laid Bare by Miracle Romano
‘In this chaotic admixture of miserable players, it is sometimes difficult to distinguish between aggressor and victim. This leads to the chilling thought that when injustice is empowered and left unchecked, corruption becomes a cycle.’
Miracle Romano reviews Ronaldo Soledad Vivo Jr.’s The Power Above Us All.
Podcast | Claire Carroll
Claire Carroll writes experimental fiction about the intersection of nature, technology and desire. On the podcast, she talks about her new short story collection, The Unreliable Nature Writer.
Podcast | Orlando Whitfield
We talk to Orlando Whitfield, writer and self-proclaimed failed art dealer about his new book, All That Glitters: A Story Of Friendship, Fraud And Fine Art.
Archive | Murder and The London Magazine by Rayner Heppenstall
‘Having in recent years become saturated with criminal history, what strikes me most about that particular occasion is that all the principal guests were in one way or another involved with murderers.’
Essay by Rayner Heppenstall
Archive | The Fifty Ninth Bear by Sylvia Plath
‘They could easily have filled up at Mammoth Junction. He switched on the long beams, but even then the little cave of light moving ahead of them seemed no match for the dark battalions of surrounding pines.’
Fiction by Sylvia Plath.
Essay | What Would the Romantics Say? by Lee Hatsumi Mayer
‘If the meaning of a poem is obvious without breaking scrolling pace, then a core aspect of the form has been lost.’
Lee Hatsumi Mayer on the Romantic poets today.
Podcast | Dan Sperrin
TLM’s political cartoonist, Dan Sperrin talks to us about the state of satire in modern Britain, David Cameron’s rogue return to cabinet and where to draw the line – if there even is one – in cartooning.