‘When I learned Burnside had died, I wondered if I had a claim to grief, and if I did, whether it was for the poet I admired or the generous teacher I had come to know.’
Callum MacKillop on John Burnside’s Empire of Forgetting.
Essay | 41 Numbered Paragraphs About Dementia and Fiction by Caleb Klaces
‘The words of reassurance assume something like this: David remains David, whatever happens, as long as someone remembers who he was. But I kept asking myself: When was he who he really was? When exactly was that? And what’s to say that it is not right now?’
Caleb Klaces on dementia and fiction.
Essay | The Leftovers by Gabrielle Showalter
‘Sandy had decimated our marine life and scarred our coastline, and then came the developers to carve up the carcass. These days, the new residents have a saying for the remaining pre-Sandy locals: the leftovers.’
Gabrielle Showalter recalls Hurricane Sandy.
Essay | Swimming Pools by Emmeline Armitage
‘Pools are a curious manipulation of the natural. Where the sea performs feeling, unbreakable and unending, the reality of the pool is one trapped, much like the icons of this era, in aesthetic permanence.’
Emmeline Armitage on the symbol of the swimming pool.
Essay | For Love of the Feral by Christiana Spens
‘To love the natural world is to take care of it, to allow it to be free, just as we often wish to be ourselves, and to carefully manage the downsides and difficulties of human exploration.’
Christiana Spens on land access rights in the UK.
Essay | Between Beirut, Gaza and Glangwili by A. Naji Bakhti
‘I was, in that moment, the thirty-four-year-old lecturer discussing the craft of writing with a young British student in my office at Aberystwyth University on Penglais hill. I was, also, the fifteen-year-old boy in his parent’s bathroom on the sixth floor of an old building in Beirut sheltering from Israeli airstrikes of 2006.’
A. Naji Bakhti on Beirut, Gaza and Glangwili.
Essay | The Aesthetic Life by Zsófia Paulikovics
‘Several broadly millennial acquaintances confess that reading the book made them feel a sort of sickening recognition.’
Zsófia Paulikovics on Perfection and Allegro Pastel.
Essay | No Designated Venue: An Oral History of London’s Music and Poetry Scenes
Yasmina Snyder spoke to writers, poets, musicians and event organisers based in London about the connections between live music and poetry, and the spaces that host them.
Essay | Why Magazines Fail by Tristram Fane Saunders
‘There’s big trouble in the world of little magazines. In the last two years, an alarming number have vanished into that second-hand bookshop in the sky. Each leaves the world a little quieter, a little poorer.’
Tristram Fane Saunders on ‘little magazines’.
Essay | Scanty Plot of Ground by Paul Muldoon
‘The ongoing capacity of the sonnet to allow for both chaos and control is one that will ensure its viability even in our increasingly fractious and factional of times.’
Paul Muldoon on the sonnet.
Essay | North Facing by Aidan Harte
‘I don’t suppose one who has been shadowed by spies and hunted by soldiers is truly knowable, but I believe I captured a sense of the man.’
Aidan Harte on meeting and sculpting Gerry Adams.
Essay | Andalusia Invisible by Rob Doyle
‘There are realms where science falls silent, zones of experience that can only be approached by a language of poetry, image, psyche, vision.’
Rob Doyle on Islamic mysticism in Andalusia.
Essay | In Space, No One Can Hear You Hope by Connor Harrison
‘Instead of allowing for doubt to linger, or for a piece of writing to leave us feeling challenged, wellbeing literature exists to soothe. It is already a difficult and confusing world, it says. Why should your reading – your free time – be difficult also?’
Connor Harrison on the ‘directionless optimism’ of Samantha Harvey’s Orbital.
Essay | Wendy Erskine: ‘Short stories are our natural mode.’
‘Short stories are our natural mode. There’s nothing intimidating about the short story. We have been reading and telling them our whole lives.’
An essay on the short story form by Wendy Erskine, reproduced with permission from 22 Fictions.
Essay | The Kind of Shaking that Keeps You Steady: Alice Notley (1945–2025)
‘The insouciant yet deeply serious quality of Notley’s writing struck me. Here was a poet eschewing all templates, excavating the self with both horror and humour.’
Momtaza Mehri pays tribute to Alice Notley who passed away this May at the age of 79.
Essay | Rough Comforts by Richie Jones
‘Twenty-nine Jack Reacher novels and counting. What does it require of the reader to make it through every headbutt of every book? What does it say about me that I have read them all? What does it say of the writer of twenty-nine Jack Reacher novels?’
Richie Jones on Lee Child’s Jack Reacher franchise.
Essay | Down the Rabbit Hole by Helena C. Aeberli
‘Even as we seek to relegate stories of witches, wonders and monsters to an absurd and irrational past, we’re drawn to retelling and retelling them.’
Helena C. Aeberli on Mary Toft, TikTok and ‘micro-histories’.
Essay | ‘It was over; thank Heaven—over’: Reading Mrs Dalloway in a Post-Pandemic World
‘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.
Essay | Staying Mute by Sara Ahmad
‘If a Brazilian electrician, pursued by the police as a result of a series of blunders, can be shot in cold blood in front of the British public – how thin is the membrane separating victim and terrorist?’
Sarah Ahmad on the 7/7 bombings, 20 years on.
Essay | Exile City by Kasra Lang
‘If the city makes no offers of belonging, it makes no demands either, unlike in America, which insists on a daily pledge of allegiance. In that sense London is the exile city par excellence.’
Kasra Lang’s essay on Joseph Conrad and Hisham Matar.
Essay | Cusk, Experimentalism and the Limits of Autofiction by Zuhri James
‘For all its claims to fluid, amorphous prose untethered to plot and traditional character development, autofiction – and herein lies the irony – remains firmly representational, if not entirely conventional.’
Zuhri James on Rachel Cusk and autofiction.
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.
Essay | Evading Capture: On Writing Two Experimental Memoirs by Jen Calleja
‘There can be many different ‘correct’ translations of the same text: I think that we each have not only multiple stories we can tell about our lives, but many forms for them, too.’
Jen Calleja on writing experimental memoir.
Essay | Syzygy, or, How to Talk to Your Dog… by Joey Connolly
‘The sheer volume of material we encounter renders our engagement with any part of it increasingly difficult.’
Joey Connolly on information overload and syzygy.