Fiction | Night As It Falls by Jakuta Alikavazovic
The following is extracted from Night As It Falls by Jakuta Alikavazovic, translated from the French by Jeffrey Zuckerman and…
Fiction | The Swallowed Man by Edward Carey
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
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
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 […]
Interview | Sam Riviere on Martial, authenticity and stealing
“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’
‘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.’
Interview | Sinéad Gleeson on Solidarity in Sickness, Isolation and Empathy
Jack Solloway Sinéad Gleeson on Solidarity in Sickness, Isolation and Empathy With the UK government currently advising ‘social distancing’…
Interview | Joe Dunthorne on Cliché, Adulting and Coming of Age
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 […]
Fiction | Blood Brothers by Jessica Andrews
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
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 […]
Essay | Dostoevsky and Poor Folk by Patrick Maxwell
Wilfred Owen captured the national spirit best when he talked of the ‘drawing-down of blinds’, surely the most succinct depiction of English melancholia. The English spirit – distinct from of Britishness, though also a part of it – is one of deep decline under the shadow of former empire. It is the spirit of T. S. Eliot’s line ‘winter’s afternoon | In a secluded chapel’ in ‘Little Gidding’; of the quiet introit sung by an evensong choir, backing away into the cathedrals’ dingy corners […]
Review | Old Food by Ed Atkins & Dark Satellites by Clemens Meyer
Want to feel young? Fitzcarraldo Editions – whose small roster of authors includes two of the last five Nobel laureates for literature – is less than five years old. Its first book, Matthias Enard’s Zone, was published in August of 2015, which makes the independent publishing house exactly three months younger than Mad Max: Fury Road […]
Fiction | Exposition by Nathalie Léger tr. Amanda DeMarco
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’
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 […]
Interview | Chris McCabe: Poems from the Edge of Extinction
Chris McCabe is the National Poetry Librarian. In 2013 he was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award and his works include numerous poetry collections, including Speculatrix (2014) and The Triumph of Cancer (2018). His new poetry anthology Poems from the Edge of Extinction, published by Chambers this year, collects poems from endangered languages […]
Interview | 2018 Short Story Prize Judges!
With only a few weeks remaining for our Short Story Prize for this year, we thought we would catch up…
Spotlight II: Dostoyevsky Wannabe
The London Magazine has long been a champion of emerging writers and independent publishers, stretching back to the 1950s and…
The London Magazine Podcast | Episode 3 | Dr Matthew Green
Welcome to episode 3 of The London Magazine podcast! This month, we spoke to Dr Matthew Green, author of…
Short Story Competition 2017
UPDATE: EXTENDED CLOSING DATE The competition will now be open for entries until November 15th. Autumn is just around the…
Essay Competition 2017
This competition is now closed. As the oldest literary and arts review in the UK, The London Magazine has a long…
Short Story Competition | Prize-Giving Ceremony
On Tuesday 28th March 2016 The London Magazine awarded the winners of the Short Story Competition 2016 during a drinks reception on the House of…
The London Magazine Short Story Competition 2016 | Winners
Thank you so much to everyone who entered The London Magazine‘s Short Story Competition 2016. We were delighted to see such a large…
An interview with Ben Ehrenreich
Just south of the village, Nabi Saleh, there is a spring. It is called Ein al Qoos or the Bow…
That Boy by Robert Nazarene
He was patient as a dead bird. He perched on the ledge of bottom and rocked. He was the…
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