‘As well as fulfilling a boyhood fantasy of building a hillside village, Portmeirion was Clough’s propaganda piece, the culmination of a career spent campaigning against unchecked “bungaloid growth” by pestering the local authorities.’
O. J. Williams reviews Sarah Baylis’s Portmeirion.
‘Here, then, is the inevitable clarion call to Prynne sceptics: read, read quickly, submit to the strange music, resist the cop in your head, be persuaded to rejoice, let the healing fountain start.’
Will Fleming on J. H. Prynne.
‘At the cinema people ask questions on process, whereas at the outdoor screenings I don’t think I’ve ever gotten a question about process; the audience talk more of themselves, their own experience.’
Lydia de Matos speaks to Andrea Luka Zimmerman.
‘Modern biology strengthens what Darwin already noted: nature experiments constantly with sex and gender, without being reduced to any single pattern.’
Alicia Kopf on Darwin, sexual selection and orchids.
‘When something like this happens then the image isn’t merely a banal transposition of reality. It creates a certain reality, of a very particular character, because it has the capacity to go beyond itself. To transcend itself.’
Oriol Ponsatí-Murlà on the advent of photography and documenting the dead.
‘I distract myself with the idea that human beings can be divided into two categories: those who wait, and those who make others wait. If forced to, I’d describe myself as one of those who wait.’
Short fiction by Sergi Pàmies.
‘If we take a closer look at them, flags don’t express the eternal identity of nations but the power relations upon which today’s nation states have been constructed and consolidated.’
Marina Garcés on Catalan flags and nation states.
‘If she’s tampering with me and my middlebrow money-grubbing from some supernatural plane, perhaps it’s just another chore to check off for the overachiever who once journaled, “What horrifies me most is the idea of being useless”.’
Melanie McGee Bianchi on Sylvia Plath’s guest editorship of Mademoiselle and Plath’s cult of perpetuity.
‘As someone of mixed heritage, I contain or embody the oppressor and the oppressed.’
Joseph Williams interviews Zakia Sewell.
‘The novel’s central question is this: can afflicted people find community and security outside of the households they were born into, or is everyone willing to manipulate and deceive those around them if the situation calls for it?’
Fonie Mitsopoulou reviews Mieko Kawakami’s Sisters in Yellow.
‘I lean on the Clive James idea that a poem is the only art form where you can order a coffee, and even before the drink has gone cold, you could have written something that will still be read in five hundred years’ time.’
Rishi Dastidar in Conversation with Sarah Howe.
‘Someone who can’t read a book cannot deliberate, cannot think and cannot conceptualise, and therefore is a threat. We couldn’t have picked a worse time to become more stupid than when we needed more intelligence.’
Alex Dommett speaks to Will Self.
‘there were war criminals around. that was / in the air. in our ice cubes. it made you feel like a decent guy.’
New poetry by Nathaniel Calhoun.
‘All those who disappeared had to come back. Or at least, they had to announce their intention to disappear before they disappeared. Otherwise, how would anybody know?’
Awarded second place in the Brick Lane Bookshop Short Story Prize 2025, ‘The Overpass’ by Jiaqi Kang.
‘And when // they upped your dose of anaesthetic, from lucid haze to euthanasia, / it was almost a mercy.’
New poetry by Jasmine Gibbs.
‘Perhaps, in Wuthering Heights, Nhất Linh saw a likeness of what was happening around him: endless divisions and cycles of violence, one side propped up as the opposite of an oppressive other, only to show itself just as capable of oppression as that sworn enemy.’
Nguyễn Bình on Nhất Linh’s Vietnamese translation of Wuthering Heights.
‘“Fearsome” is a word I heard almost as soon as I stepped into the gallery. And perhaps this is a good corrective to the soft, all-giving image of Hawai‘i as the paradisal realm of flower-garlanded aloha. There isn’t a hula girl anywhere in sight here.’
Alex Wong reviews ‘Hawai‘i: A Kingdom Crossing Oceans’ at the British Museum.
‘the global capitalists / were thrilled, too, because to make / every consumable product organic, // a veritable living thing, is to guarantee / perpetual repeated / obsolescence’
New poetry from Stephen Kampa.
‘And then, finally, what really puzzled him: what, I mean, what were women? What was it about them, as a group, that had always made him a little wary? They suddenly seemed too wearying an abstraction, like the geometry of curved space.’
New fiction by Madeleine Stein.
‘There’s a certain kind of force that’s required to set off a novel, a tension that’s been built before the start of the book – call it backstory, call it the setup, call it the inciting event: it’s what needs to be in place for the story to begin.’
Larissa Pham on fiction and flights.
‘For folk to make sense now, it has to change to reflect communities and the times that we live in. It doesn’t make sense to cling desperately to the past.’
Rose Brookfield interviews Lally MacBeth
‘History in Minor Black Figures is not so much a ‘vaster social context’ than something to be looked at, discussed and then turned away from. Like a painting, or a petri dish.’
Joseph Williams reviews Brandon Taylor’s Minor Black Figures.
‘It seems as though we have gone through the painting and are living inside the vanishing point: creating the means of our own self-effacement, using them, bemoaning their existence and continuing to use them anyway.’
Zoe Guttenplan on invisible media, AI and the age of sameness.
‘In his own life, money had been nearly but never wholly absent, manifested in quantities of just-barely- and almost-enough.’
Short fiction by Adrian Nathan West.
