‘the global capitalists / were thrilled, too, because to make / every consumable product organic, // a veritable living thing, is to guarantee / perpetual repeated / obsolescence’
New poetry from Stephen Kampa.
Fiction | What Are You Reading? by Madeleine Stein
‘And then, finally, what really puzzled him: what, I mean, what were women? What was it about them, as a group, that had always made him a little wary? They suddenly seemed too wearying an abstraction, like the geometry of curved space.’
New fiction by Madeleine Stein.
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.
Interview | Folk for the Future: An Interview with Lally MacBeth
‘For folk to make sense now, it has to change to reflect communities and the times that we live in. It doesn’t make sense to cling desperately to the past.’
Rose Brookfield interviews Lally MacBeth
Review | Under Laboratory Conditions by Joseph Williams
‘History in Minor Black Figures is not so much a ‘vaster social context’ than something to be looked at, discussed and then turned away from. Like a painting, or a petri dish.’
Joseph Williams reviews Brandon Taylor’s Minor Black Figures.
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.
Fiction | Dogelon Mars by Adrian Nathan West
‘In his own life, money had been nearly but never wholly absent, manifested in quantities of just-barely- and almost-enough.’
Short fiction by Adrian Nathan West.
Poetry | Time Management by Nasim Luczaj
‘So what that it was okay to call it / a day? Does delight ever feel done? And hell / will come, whether or not you schedule it.’
New poetry by Nasim Luczaj.
Poetry | The Erymanthian Boar by Rachel Curzon
‘We’re going now, I said, // to say something definite. / And when the car began its song / the street sang it back, // all lamentation.’
New poetry by Rachel Curzon.
Interview | In Conversation with Rob Doyle
‘I feel that each book I write, and particularly each novel, becomes a monument to a phase of life, and more often than not to the crisis it coincides with.’
Jamie Cameron speaks to Rob Doyle.
Review | On the T. S. Eliot Prize Shortlist 2025 by Dominic Leonard
‘It is easy to bemoan the quality of poetry’s decline, when in fact the quantity of good stuff published each year has stayed relatively constant, if you know where to look and whose judgement to trust.’
Dominic Leonard reviews the 2025 T. S. Eliot Prize shortlist.
Poetry | Let’s Dive In by Daniel Addercouth
‘I don’t want to exaggerate, / but I could be happy anywhere. Together, / our losses make a home, wouldn’t you say?’
New poetry by Daniel Addercouth.
Interview | Camilla Grudova on Sentimentality, Short Forms and Being Gross
‘There’s a wonderful quote from an Angela Carter story, in which one character says to another, “Bowels are a great leveller.” And I think that’s true.’
Devki Panchmatia interviews Camilla Grudova.
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.
Interview | Lillian Fishman on Sex, Self-Knowledge and Psychoanalysis
‘I’m not interested at all in critiquing what’s wrong in our culture. I’m interested in what attracts us to its seedier elements. And attraction in general.’
Emmeline Armitage speaks to Lillian Fishman.
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.
Review | Famous Heaney by Jack Barron
‘Both his Poems and Letters, in different registers, show a private poet courting lyric publicity and cultivating a voice of guarded ambiguity: memorable, yes, but sacrificing true risk for renown.’
Jack Barron reviews Seamus Heaney’s collected Poems and Letters.
Fiction | Black Cake by Renesha Dhanraj
‘Sitting across the ornate coffee table from my husband, I felt as if I was seeing him for the first time. I told him so, somewhat jokingly, but mainly to crush the silence that had overtaken us, and was about to add, At least we can finally catch our breath, eh? but then I was overcome by the feeling of telling a lie, so I kept the rest to myself.’
Winner of The London Magazine Short Story Prize 2025.
Interview | Lili Anolik on Didion, Babitz and Literary Stardom by Emmeline Armitage
‘You’re probably going to hurt people’s feelings. But you can’t let yourself think about that. You’ve got to stay detached, cool eyed. If you can’t do that, you might as well pack it in and become an academic or something.’
Emmeline Armitage interviews Lili Anolik.
Review | Fictionally Speaking, True by Hassan Akram
‘Smith is an excellent dissector of power and identity, but conventional party politics are not in her line.’
Hassan Akram reviews Zadie Smith’s Dead and Alive.
Review | Most Men Are Losers by Guy Stagg
‘While toxic figures with millions of online followers dominate the cultural conversation about masculinity, Szalay’s novels offer a more honest account of male experience. In short, most men are losers.’
Guy Stagg reviews David Szalay’s Booker-shortlisted novel, Flesh.
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.
Review | To Go Through the Raskolnikov Process by Hugh Foley
‘The result is beyond his competence as a writer, but it is nevertheless an interesting attempt to channel alt-lit’s commitment in new directions.’
Hugh Foley reviews Jordan Castro’s Muscle Man.
Interview | Tim MacGabhann on Short Stories and the Anti-Plot Sentence
‘Even if you’re writing in the third person, in that George Eliot-style, zoomed-out voice, every narrator is a person. Who are they? How do they know this stuff? The reader may never know who they are, but you need to know who they are.’
Joseph Williams speaks to Tim MacGabhann.