‘Cities, as Brecht depicts them, live double lives. Their inhabitants live cheek to jowl and are given to exchanging pleasantries and meaningless conversation ad nauseam.’
Luke Dunne on Bertolt Brecht’s poem ‘Of Poor B.B.’
Poetry | Helen When Asked by Nina Reljić
‘My face was not the most beautiful / but any person was entitled to think it was / and what terrifying pleasure in that.’
Nina Reljić’s winning poem in this year’s Poetry Prize.
Review | A Very British Revolt by John Merrick
‘Britain, whoever is in power, is a small-c conservative place.’
John Merrick on the 1926 General Strike.
Essay | A 2026 Survey of Poets
Sixty-four years on from the original survey, The London Magazine speaks to fifteen poets, including Jorie Graham, Don Paterson, A. E. Stallings and more, about the state of contemporary poetry.
Fiction | Mostly Children by Sam Corbett
‘The loneliness I felt, sitting at that table eating my sandwich, was breathtaking. It was a feeling I didn’t know I was capable of summoning.’
New short fiction by Sam Corbett.
Review | An Open Wound by Laura Baliman
‘Each author simply holds a looking glass towards the fabric of manhood, and Stuart’s glass seems to catch the light a little more.’
Laura Baliman reviews Boyhood by David Keenan and John of John by Douglas Stuart.
Review | A Village as Small as a Thimble by Gabrielle McClellan
‘If Müller’s oeuvre captures the absurdities of this dogmatic regime, then Heimatliteratur is the paradox of village and fatherland, the intractability of home and violence.’
Gabrielle McClellan reviews Herta Müller’s The Village on the Edge of the World.
Review | Cloughed Up by O. J. Williams
‘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.
Essay | The Practical Limits of Daylight: In Memory of J. H. Prynne
‘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.
Interview | Wayfaring Stranger: An Interview with Andrea Luka Zimmerman
‘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.
Essay | Ophrys, or Of Seduction by Alicia Kopf
‘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.
Essay | Imaging the Invisible by Oriol Ponsatí-Murlà
‘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.
Fiction | On Not Knowing English by Sergi Pàmies
‘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.
Essay | Flags Made in China by Marina Garcés
‘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.
Essay | Sylvia, the Ghost Writer by Melanie McGee Bianchi
‘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.
Interview | Post-Pastoral: An Interview with Zakia Sewell
‘As someone of mixed heritage, I contain or embody the oppressor and the oppressed.’
Joseph Williams interviews Zakia Sewell.
Review | Common People by Fonie Mitsopoulou
‘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.
Interview | Rishi Dastidar in Conversation with Sarah Howe
‘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.
Interview | Will Self on the End of Satire, the Rise of Fascism and Writing His Own Death
‘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.
Poetry | Monrovia, 2010 by Nathaniel Calhoun
‘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.
Fiction | The Overpass by Jiaqi Kang
‘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.
Poetry | Dear Dolly by Jasmine Gibbs
‘And when // they upped your dose of anaesthetic, from lucid haze to euthanasia, / it was almost a mercy.’
New poetry by Jasmine Gibbs.
Essay | The Windy Moors of Đà Lạt by Nguyễn Bình
‘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.
Review | Hawai‘i: Another United Kingdom by Alex Wong
‘“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.