‘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.
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.
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.
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.
Essay | Liftoff: On Writing and Flight by Larissa Pham
‘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.
Essay | Inside the Vanishing Point by Zoe Guttenplan
‘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.
Essay | Remembering John Burnside in The Empire of Forgetting by Callum MacKillop
‘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.