‘Satisfaction, the novel suggests, is commingled: it is either heightened or diluted by the emotions of those around you.’
Lee Hatsumi Mayer reviews Kathy Wang’s The Satisfaction Cafe.
Interview | The Expansion Project: An Interview with Ben Pester
‘I remember being cross at work when Google were getting rid a bit of software and the announcement said Google is “sunsetting” this product. Sunsetting! You can’t have the sunset.’
Joseph Williams speaks to Ben Pester.
Interview | Joanna Pocock on Greyhound and America as the Ailing Motherland
‘I love the fact that Americans are still working out concepts like, what is freedom? What does freedom look like? Is it libertarian? Is it a socialist thing? Is it more of a free market thing? They grapple with the big things.’
Emmeline Armitage speaks to Joanna Pocock.
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.
Poetry | Two Poems by Sam Harvey
‘No one wakes up on // top of an oak tree and everyone is convinced, for a / moment an angel is sitting next to her on the branch.’
Two poems by Sam Harvey, shortlisted for The London Magazine Poetry Prize 2025.
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.
Fiction | Two Portraits by Carlos Paguada
‘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.
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.
Review | The Shadow at Evening by Patrick Cash
‘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.
Review | Look with a Capital L by Joseph Williams
‘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.
Review | Use the Words You Have by Kimberly Campanello
‘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.
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.
Interview | ‘An anti-flâneuse kind of existence’: In conversation with Lauren Elkin
‘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.
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.
Fiction | Saraswati by Gurnaik Johal
‘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.
Interview | Caught up in History: In Conversation with Viet Thanh Nguyên
‘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.
Fiction | Here it Was, the Start of Life by Harriet Armstrong
‘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.
Poetry | Aspiration by Kevin Graham
‘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.
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.
Interview | ‘Whose freedom would you sacrifice for your own?’: Performing The Crucible in 2025
‘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.
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.
Interview | Uncommon Ground: An Interview with Patrick Galbraith
‘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.
Interview | The Call is Coming from Inside the House: An Interview with Krystelle Bamford
‘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.