‘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.
Essay | Dear Chris Kraus & Ovid & Saul Bellow… by Tommy Gilhooly
‘If autofiction is the fictionalisation of autobiographical facts, the epistolary novel is the factualisation of the fictitious.’
Tommy Gilhooly on the epistolary novel and ‘I Love Dick’.
Essay | Looking and Looking Away at the Same Time by Adam Heardman
‘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.