‘In the end, said Chandler, as one grew older, one grew out of gangsters and blondes and guns and, since they were the chief ingredients of thrillers, short of space fiction, that was that.’
Ian Fleming recounts his friendship with Raymond Chandler.
Review | Surveillance in Miniature by Hannah Hutchings-Georgiou
‘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?’.
News | Amaan Hyder wins The London Magazine Short Story Prize 2024
‘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.
Interview | Purgatory by the Sea: Jon Fosse in Conversation
‘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.
Archive | Heresies by Deborah Levy
‘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.
Interview | Laughter and Tears: Alejandro Zambra in Conversation
‘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.
Review | Poor Art, Rich Rewards by Daisy Sainsbury
‘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’.
Guide | London in Five: November 2024
‘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.
Archive | Letter in November by Sylvia Plath
‘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.
Staff Picks | Halloween
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.
Fiction | Submechanophobia by Charlotte Tierney
‘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.
Archive | Blacamán the Good Miracle Seller by Gabriel García Márquez
‘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.
Interview | The Garden as Political Metaphor with Olivia Laing and Richard Porter
‘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.
Interview | ‘Freedom in Multitudes’: Explorations of the Self with Sosa Omorogbe
‘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.
Archive | The Mother of the Child in Question by Doris Lessing
‘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.