1. Staff Picks
A collage of book covers on the halloween book list, including Angela Carter's 'The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories' and Shehan Karunatilaka's The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida

Staff Picks | Halloween

Staff Picks

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 | Asphyxia by Violette Leduc

Fiction, Fiction, Staff Picks, Writing

My mother never gave me her hand… She always helped me on and off pavements by pinching my frock or coat very lightly at the spot where the armhole provides a grip. It humiliated me. I felt I was inside the body of an old horse with my carter dragging me along by one ear… One afternoon, as a gleaming carriage sped past, splattering the leaden summer with its reflections, I pushed the hand away right in the middle of the road. She pinched the cloth […]

Interview | Seán Hewitt on Tongues of Fire, the Androgynous Lyric and ‘Pre-elegy’

Interviews, Staff, Staff Picks, Writing

I’m not actually a fan of Wordsworth. Of all the grand Romantic poets, I love John Clare. What I balk at with Wordsworth might be something that I’m concerned about in my own writing. We do this a lot. I say I don’t like people that are perhaps similar to me. Or I recognise a tendency in myself for the Wordsworthian, which is something I try to hold back on. Perhaps when I read Wordsworth it makes me cringe because I recognise my own tendencies to want […]

Fiction | The Swallowed Man by Edward Carey

Fiction, Staff Picks, TLM Book Club, TLM Featured, Writing

I am writing this account, in another man’s book, by candlelight, inside the belly of a fish. I have been eaten. I have been eaten, yet I am living still. I have tried to get out. I have made many attempts. But I must conclude that it is not possible. I am trapped within an enormous creature and am slowly being digested. I have found a strange place to exist, a cave between life and death. It is an unhappy miracle. I am afraid  of  the  dark. The dark is coming for me […]

Interview | ‘The party that never stops’: Sarah Lucas on The Colony Room Club, Soho, with Darren Coffield

Interviews, Preview, Staff Picks, TLM Featured, Writing

I was with Damien Hirst and Angus Fairhurst (I imagine) and we popped in. It was dingy, green and crowded. Also smoky. Ian Board was behind the bar insulting people and swearing as they came in. I thought he was horrible. Someone said, ‘He’s alright when you get to know him.’ I thought, I’ll bear that in mind. I didn’t go back for a long while. By that time Ian was dead. He was still there in the form of his sculpted head which contained his ashes. Michael Wojas said that you can roll a pinch up […]

Spotlight VI: Small Presses | British Book Awards Special 2020

News, Staff Picks, TLM Featured, Writing

With publishers big and small struggling through the current crisis, it is important for us to shine a spotlight on small presses, the work that they do and the books and authors that they publish. Recently recognised among the nine regional and country winners in the Small Press of the Year Award at the 2020 British Book Awards, today we shine the spotlight on four of the best small presses currently publishing in the UK and Ireland: Jacaranda Books, Sandstone Press, Comma Press and The Lilliput Press […]

Fiction | Radon Girls by Lauren Sarazen

Fiction, Staff Picks, Writing

I set my bag down at my feet, and looked back at the way I’d come, sweating, breathing hard. The path was narrow and shaped by switchbacks that snaked up the hill. It disappeared behind a bend adorned with a clump of morning glories that made the climb look bucolic and gentle. This was a lie. They hadn’t told me about the hills, the uneven quality of the roads. They’d told me to hire a cart to bring me up to the house, but I wasn’t in the habit of ordering carts. […]

Fiction | Fear In Your Water by Julia Bell

Fiction, Staff Picks, Writing

I had been reading Foucault – and not understanding it properly; I was too distracted to concentrate. But I got the gist of it, at least what I thought was the important stuff, what he was saying about madness and how it has been civilised out of us, how back in the day it used to be that sane people and mad people all lived together and there wasn’t so much of a difference. And ‘mad’ people were often seen as visionaries with special access to God. It was only when people […]

Interview | Sam Riviere on Martial, authenticity and stealing

Interviews, News, Staff, Staff Picks, TLM Featured, Writing

“I discovered Martial’s poetry by searching for the number 104 for an unrelated reason, which was recorded on Wikipedia as being the year he probably died. I trust this kind of chance occurrence, and it led me to reading some of the epigrams, which I imagine I had vaguely heard of before. I responded immediately to their playfulness, sarcasm, brevity, devotion to social commentary, and general refusal of seriousness – especially things like Martial’s own admission that his poems aren’t even that good, a lot of the time.” […]

Interview | Jonathan Simons on Analog Sea, Neo-Romanticism and ‘The Contemplative Gap’

Interviews, Staff, Staff Picks, TLM Featured, Writing

‘The discomfort of boredom is never something human beings have liked, but reality and nature and the lack of technology, and the rudimentary qualities of technology, pushed back on us. The friction that we want to eradicate is defined by boredom and old age and sickness and death, and we need these things to be human, and we need these things to have interesting, vital arts and letters as well.’

Archive | This month in The London Magazine… 250 years ago (March 1770)

Staff Picks, Writing

As England’s oldest literary periodical, The London Magazine has an illustrious history dating back to 1732. To celebrate our heritage, we delved into the archives to discover what was in the magazine exactly 250 years ago this month, in March 1770. A selection of fascinating excerpts is presented below. Many of the writers’ concerns seem strange or even quaint to us now, but several topics of discussion seem to be of enduring relevance […]

Interview | Joe Dunthorne on Cliché, Adulting and Coming of Age

Interviews, Staff, Staff Picks, TLM Featured, Writing

What do we even want from coming of age? Do we want to be wise, mature people, or do we just care about ticking off a list of pre-agreed markers: homeowning, or a long-term relationship, or whatever it is? Ultimately, you can be a child, you can be the most immature and undeveloped human, and have achieved all those things. So obviously it’s a problematic term. Obviously, Catcher in the Rye is the ultimate touchstone for literary coming-of-age for most people […]

Archive | Roger Blin and Beckett by Mary Benson

Interviews, Staff Picks, Writing

‘…Some were to say, “At last, a Christian play!” but I soon came to the conviction that for Beckett it was a mockery. I didn’t want to press the symbolic side. I didn’t bother the actors by saying, “Look, careful, this is very important, it means something other than it seems”. I wanted them to discover it for themselves; through the rehearsals they should give something surpassing the everyday realism of tramps — who finally are not tramps but you and me.’ […]

Fiction | Blood Brothers by Jessica Andrews

Fiction, Staff Picks, TLM Featured, Writing

When we were splattered with freckles and tied up in pigtails, we picked sharp rocks from the garden and pushed them into each other’s wrists, our flesh tender and white like peeled crabs. I remember the way our wounds looked, mushy and filled with pieces of grit. ‘Now we are blood brothers,’ I said. She looked at me from behind her nose. ‘Blood sisters,’ she pouted. We got changed on the back seat of the car every Wednesday night as my mam drove us from school […]

Interview | Emma Donoghue on writing hunger

Interviews, Staff Picks, TLM Featured, Writing

Set in Ireland in 1858, seven years after the potato famine, The Wonder tells the story of an English nurse who is hired to spend two weeks observing an eleven-year old girl, who, her parents claim, has not eaten for months. Based on the almost fifty cases of ‘fasting girls’ – of women who claimed to be surviving without food for months on end in Europe and North America between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries – Donoghue’s novel anticipates the invention of anorexia […]

Interview | Jane Draycott on sound poetry, translation and poetic process

Interviews, Staff Picks, Writing

‘It’s dark in here and forest green: Britannica, sixteen oak trees in a London living room, / the little girl, my mother, in the bookcase glass. / Italy, Ithaca, Izmail, Japan, each page a mainsail, / turning, HMS Discovery – none of the rivers of southern Italy is of any great importance.’ – Jane Draycott, ‘Italy to Lord’. British poet Jane Draycott is interested in sound poetry and collaboration. Her translation of the Middle English poem Pearl won the Stephen Spender Prize […]

Fiction | Exposition by Nathalie Léger tr. Amanda DeMarco

Fiction, Staff Picks, Teaser, TLM Book Club, TLM Featured, Writing

She enters. She is roused by anger and reproach. She bursts onto the right of the image as if it were a backdrop masked with curtains. One hand clutches a knife against her waist, which gleams obliquely across her belly. Her face is cold, her mouth thin, lips tight, eyebrows knit, her gaze is clear and hard, her hair is slicked into two little severely parted plaits. The knife, whose handle disappears into her balled fist, vibrates at the very center, nearly absent from it […]

Essay | Vonnegut’s ‘Black Humor’

Essays, Staff Picks, TLM Featured, Writing

I had made her so unhappy that she had developed a sense of humor, which she certainly didn’t have when I married her . . . This line from Bluebeard’s narrator remarks on another kind of humor, the black humor Vonnegut is best known for. Its source is helplessness and despair. He explains: Laughter or crying is what a human being does when there’s nothing else he can do […]

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