‘How is it possible to move on from such widespread collective trauma, and forget the innumerable dead? This is the question at the heart of Mrs Dalloway.’
Elizabeth Gourd on Mrs Dalloway, 100 years on.
Interview | Uncommon Ground: An Interview with Patrick Galbraith
‘If people really engaged with the countryside, really understood it, I think there would be fewer calls for more access.’
Tommy Gilhooly speaks to Patrick Galbraith.
Interview | The Call is Coming from Inside the House: An Interview with Krystelle Bamford
‘There’s a certain hubris in being shocked by tragedy and then turning it into a myth. It’s like, something that happens to everyone becomes this epic, world-shattering thing because it happened to you.’
Krystelle Bamford interviewed by Lilia Fetini.
Interview | John Cornwell on Death in Devon and Ted Hughes’s Theory of the Troglodyte
‘Why do people enjoy true crime? I think the procedural aspect of it, the detective work – which is a natural page turner – that makes it very enjoyable, and it takes you right out of yourself – if it’s good.’
Tommy Gilhooly speaks to John Cornwell about his true crime classic Earth to Earth.
Interview | Hanna Thomas Uose on Immortality and Tech Bros
‘Within the next 15 to 20 years, I would bet there’s going to be a group of people who are on some form of fairly effective longevity medication.’
Isabel Brooks speaks to Hanna Thomas Uose.
Interview | The Rest of Our Lives: Benjamin Markovits in Conversation
‘The reason I want to write novels rather than philosophy is that I want whatever point the novel makes to have a kind of undertone of disagreement with itself.’
Jamie Cameron speaks to Benjamin Markovits.
Interview | Textures of Ambivalence: Harriet Baker on Woolf, Warner and Lehmann
‘I was taking a revisionary feminist approach to literary archives, in the sense that I wanted to argue for the value of these domestic texts, that they can indeed tell a whole of a life.’
An interview with Harriet Baker, winner of the Sunday Times Charlotte Aitken Young Writer of the Year Award.
Fiction | shee-shee-shee by Kerry Hood
‘I know about things left too long to boil, things too hot to ever touch. I know there’s a kind of human who can take a single moment and make it better just by living it.’
New short fiction by Kerry Hood.
Fiction | The Inspection by Joshua Jones
‘Maybe they just won’t look up, he said. Many people go their whole lives without looking up.’
New short fiction by Joshua Jones.
Review | Art as Archive by Meesha Williams
‘Where dominant narratives and imagery tend to sanitise motherhood, all white sheets or postpartum glow, Gore’s depiction is tender and painful in a way that feels truthful.’
Meesha Williams reviews Sylee Gore’s Maximum Summer.
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.
Interview | ‘Left Hand, Right Hand’: Christopher Le Brun and Charlotte Verity
‘We are both more in favour of speaking rather than shouting, and as visual hunters we are happier when seeking than we are when parading the spoils of the hunt.’
An interview with Christopher Le Brun and Charlotte Verity.
Fiction | Roses, Falling by Rupert Dastur
‘I cannot believe what I’m seeing, but there is no doubting it: roses are falling from the sky; the sort to fill vases or lay on gravesides: red and white, peach and pink, full-headed, green tear-drop leaves spaced along thorny stem.’
New fiction by Rupert Dastur.
Fiction | Dengue Boy by Michel Nieva
‘With relief, with childlike awe, she understood that her entire life had been determined by a grammatical error.’
An extract from Dengue Boy by Michel Nieva.
Fiction | Margot by Marni Appleton
‘It wasn’t that I didn’t love Margot. I did, desperately, but watching people make fun of her made me feel better about myself. It was one of the only things that did.’
Short fiction by Marni Appleton. An extract from ‘I Hope You’re Happy’.
Interview | Tony Tulathimutte: ‘A short story can do almost anything a novel can.’
‘I tend to enjoy writers who are good at writing gasbags; those who are in love with the sound of their own awful voice.’
Lilia Fetini speaks to Tony Tulathimutte.
Interview | The Search for Truth: Michael Amherst in Conversation
‘I’m surprised that we’ve reached this weird cultural moment where we’re constantly trying to work out what is true, what is based on someone’s experience, particularly in relation to work that maybe meets the definition of autofiction.’
An interview with Michael Amherst.
Fiction | Anywhere Apart from Here by Beth Preece
‘I hope there is something just beyond the purview of my language that goes further than just wanting to be a woman and not always having been one.’
New short fiction by Beth Preece.
Interview | Jacqueline Feldman: ‘It’s salutary to spend time around people who have arranged their lives in radical ways.’
Julia Steiner interviews Jacqueline Feldman about Precarious Lease: The Paris Document: a book of literary reportage on Parisian squats of the early 2010s.
Fiction | Signal by A. E. Macleod
‘Not until later does he pose to himself the question: why does he imagine it is a woman bound in the basement and not a man?’
New fiction by A. E. Macleod.
Essay | Low-quality Sonic Snapshots by Marie Thompson
‘Personal assistants are typically imagined to be female – it is a role that has historically been undertaken by women. Likewise, many of the smartphones’ various ‘assistants’ are gendered as female – they are part of a long historical lineage of robotic femininities.’
An extract by Marie Thompson from Bodies of Sound: Becoming a Feminist Ear.
Interview | Mingling with Caleb Parkin
‘Hope can be quite a toxic construct. It’s often invested in preserving the present, but what version of the present are we hoping to continue?’
Tom Nutting speaks to poet and educator, Caleb Parkin.
Interview | Gustav Parker Hibbett: ‘I grew up with other people being the authority in defining my identity.’
Jamie Cameron speaks to Gustav Parker Hibbett about form, identity and what it felt like to be shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize for their collection, High Jump as Icarus Story.
Review | ‘Song is a strong thing’: On the T. S. Eliot Prize Shortlist by Dominic Leonard
‘Whether in subject, form, style or quality, a shortlist can at least set out the stall of contemporary poetry and say: this is, for better or worse, what’s going on.’
Dominic Leonard reviews the 2024 T. S. Eliot Prize shortlist.