‘There’s an assurance that we are kin, and that out of such historically violent incomprehensibility, a total and coherent world can emerge.’
Adam Heardman on Auerbach and the history of violence.
Essay | Bagel City by Hugh Foley
‘My job, when talking to my daughter, is to guess what she means, her job is to guess what I mean. We believe things about each other. But how do we have a concept of meaning before we have a whole language? When does an infant have a meaningful sense of meaning?’
Hugh Foley on Taylor Swift, Chat GPT and the broader uses and abuses of meaning.
Essay | When Speech Was Speech by Kira McPherson
‘Focusing on speech marks alone overlooks what novels can do in their absence. What if ambiguity is the point?’
Kira McPherson on speech marks, or lack thereof.
Essay | Meat Space by Hugh Foley
‘Ultimately, I think, in this moment, the body doesn’t matter. It’s just another thing to upload onto the cloud. Or rather, it matters because it’s the ultimate thing to upload. The realest thing.’
Hugh Foley on bodybuilding influencers.
Essay | Tory Britain’s Literary Post-Mortem by Katie Tobin
‘In the time that has lapsed between Evenings and Weekends’ period setting and today, the world has been rocked by a global pandemic, and seen Britain usher in four new Prime Ministers, one of whom was outlasted by a Tesco lettuce.’
Katie Tobin on austerity’s literary legacy.
Essay | Notes on Context by Callum Tilley
‘Entwining deeply personal stories into a tense political context allows for the exploration of the effects of this context at an individual level that, while fictionalised, is also infused with reality.’
Callum Tilley on politics in art.
Essay | Voice Memories by Ian Wang
‘They are less interviews than they are extended passages of domestic caterwauling. A sound editor would have an aneurysm.’
Ian Wang on voice memories.
Essay | Izabela the Valiant: The Story of an Indomitable Polish Princess by Adam Zamoyski
‘The joy of taking on a subject not previously covered by historians is that one can approach it with an open mind, uncovering and assessing virgin sources like an archaeologist.’
Adam Zamoyski on Izabela Czartoryska.
Essay | Literary Professionals and Other Mythical Creatures by Fernando Sdrigotti
‘To insist on seeing writing as a profession is both delusional and symptomatic of the LinkedInfication of everyday life – that very neoliberal desire to establish hierarchies between culture producers: the pros and the amateurs. This validation-seeking division is senseless, for what’s so wrong with amateurism?’
Fernando Sdrigotti on Literary Professionals.
Essay | ‘Everything Shapes What It Encounters’: On the Life and Work of John Burnside by Tom Branfoot
‘As he writes in The Music of Time, ‘to make a poem at all is an act of hope’, for a future in which somebody is present, attending to the music and the craft.’
Tom Branfoot remembers the late John Burnside.
Essay | Pareidolia by Tallulah Griffith
‘I guess maybe that’s called haunting, that magic pull of things akin to those in our glass boxes, things that cannot last.’
New writing by Tallulah Griffith.
Essay | The Secret Earth by Charlotte Stroud
‘It is for this reason that I never go to my field at this time of day but wait instead until I can be alone. Only then, in my experience, will it show me a secret.’
Charlotte Stroud on the secrets of the countryside.
Essay | Giving Up by Christiana Spens
‘All at once, it felt nihilistic and misguided. I had been on this extended fast, but it was devoted to absent men and not any real god. As such, there had been no revelation or resolution, no peace.’
Christiana Spens on Lent.
Essay | Frock Consciousness by Katie Tobin
‘So what is the power of literary fashion, then? For me it lies in its virtuality, that imaginary quality of the ekphrastic, something so beautiful that it cannot exist in real life as we know it on the page. That virtuality also ties into the codification of clothing, and how it might suggest something about its wearer without saying as much.’
Katie Tobin on the Bloomsbury Group and fashion.
Essay | The Song of Decline: Aspects of Contemporary Latvian Poetry by Ivars Šteinbergs
‘In other words, there is a love that waits, and it has been and is being published in Latvia – as well as elsewhere – right now, before our eyes.’
Ivars Šteinbergs on Latvian poetry.
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.
Essay | One Hundred Years of Nijinska
‘Both contemporary pieces seek to build on this revolutionary choreography rather than imitate it perfectly, yet both acknowledge that Nijinska’s work marked key developments in the world of choreography, bridging the gap between one century and the next in the world of classical dance. So how did it come to pass that now she is known primarily as a keeper of her brother’s career?’
Esmee Wright on Bronislava Nijinska.
Essay | For the Sake of a Few Trees by Pacifica Goddard
Pacifica Goddard on Hetch Hetchy & The Greatest Good
Essay | The Draft of the Medusa by Andrew Gallix [Extract]
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Essay | Duelling Quills by Fernando Sdrigotti
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Essay | Fight or Flight by Daisy Sainsbury
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Essay | Shelf Haunting by Jeremy Wikeley
Jeremy Wikeley Shelf Haunting . . Before the pandemic, when coincidences still happened, I was haunted by the poet Gavin…
Essay | Harry Diamond’s Some London People, Fifty Years On by Adelaide Crosby
Adelaide Crosby Harry Diamond’s Some London People, Fifty Years On While perhaps best known by-proxy for his relationship with Francis…
Essay | Manet, Mandarins and Me by Chloë Ashby
Chloë Ashby Manet, Mandarins and Me My husband doesn’t enjoy peeling oranges. He doesn’t like the little white webs…