‘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.
‘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.
‘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.
‘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.
‘No sudden catastrophe; witness / years of crumbling stone, / rotting libraries, addled brains.’
New poetry by Graham Allison.
‘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.
‘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.
‘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.
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.
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.
‘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
‘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.
‘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.
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.
Writer Vida Adamczewski talks to us about reproductive rights in the UK, corporeality, and literary ‘form-fucking’.
