‘The few people I have shared this experience with tend to fall into two camps: those who praise my abilities to invent things that never happened and those who believe that I’m just being deliberately obtuse. Everyone’s entitled to their fair share of scepticism, right?’
Short fiction by Carlos Paguada.
‘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.
‘The much-lauded style of Hollinghurst’s prose is abundantly present, with an elegance in the sentences that never obscures the pull of the narrative.’
Patrick Cash reviews Alan Hollinghurst’s Our Evenings.
‘Charming and funny, warm and inquisitive, the reflecting Dyer provides a page-turner that entertains you just long enough to forget the sad fact of it all, that even camera-less pictures warp and fade.’
Joseph Williams reviews Geoff Dyer’s memoir, Homework.
‘Use the Words You Have is not just a novel of desire. It’s a meditation on the nature of language itself.’
Bruce Omar Yates reviews Kimberly Campanello’s debut novel, Use the Words You Have.
‘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.
‘I don’t know if it’s very interesting to read fiction where you can feel that the author is judging the character. It’s so important that the novel be a space of non-judgment, for the readers to take from it what they will.’
Rosa Appignanesi interviews Lauren Elkin.
‘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.
‘It had been an early education, Nathu thought, in the fact that all history was historical fiction. A story had a longer life than a fact.’
An extract from Saraswati by Gurnaik Johal.
‘What becomes important for me is to think about ourselves not only as individuals, which is what memoirs are typically supposed to deal with, but as people who are caught up in history.’
Arjuna Keshvani-Ham interviews Viet Thanh Nguyên.
‘I wanted to learn something that would shock me, something that came from someplace very far outside of myself. I was tired of learning things I could have pulled out of my own mind very easily and passively.’
New fiction by Harriet Armstrong.
‘We talk lightly as if we know the outcome / of things, the floor of knowledge // an oily ghost that leaves me when they shift / gears into medical jargon.’
Winning poem from The London Magazine Poetry Prize 2025.
‘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.
‘It’s an obvious thing to say but bad things happen when people are afraid, oppressed and silenced. If we could only take heed of the lessons that history has attempted to teach us.’
Hannah Saxby and Phoebe Pryce discuss performing Arthur Miller’s The Crucible in 2025.
‘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’.
‘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.
‘If people really engaged with the countryside, really understood it, I think there would be fewer calls for more access.’
Tommy Gilhooly speaks to Patrick Galbraith.
‘There’s a certain hubris in being shocked by tragedy and then turning it into a myth. It’s like, something that happens to everyone becomes this epic, world-shattering thing because it happened to you.’
Krystelle Bamford interviewed by Lilia Fetini.
‘Why do people enjoy true crime? I think the procedural aspect of it, the detective work – which is a natural page turner – that makes it very enjoyable, and it takes you right out of yourself – if it’s good.’
Tommy Gilhooly speaks to John Cornwell about his true crime classic Earth to Earth.
‘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.
‘When I passed the baby to her to hold, she did so with the bored detachment of a taxi driver holding a name card at an airport.’
New short fiction by Gráinne O’Hare.
‘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.
‘Within the next 15 to 20 years, I would bet there’s going to be a group of people who are on some form of fairly effective longevity medication.’
Isabel Brooks speaks to Hanna Thomas Uose.
‘The reason I want to write novels rather than philosophy is that I want whatever point the novel makes to have a kind of undertone of disagreement with itself.’
Jamie Cameron speaks to Benjamin Markovits.
