‘Part of the editors’ mission can be crudely stated as pitching a ‘woke Shelley’, a poet who destabilised gender norms and somehow anticipated the concept of non-binary.’
Suzi Feay reviews ‘Percy Shelley for Our Times’
Review | Surveillance in Miniature by Hannah Hutchings-Georgiou
‘Fatima subtly observes that domesticity – the unit of the family, the capitalist-defined utopia of social togetherness, of selfhood and nationhood itself – always depends on the poor who stand outside of it.’
Hannah Hutchings-Georgiou reviews ‘Is Someone There?’.
Review | Mummy Issues by Katie Tobin
‘Minor gripes aside, Mother State is an impressive paean to the expansive possibility of motherhood, of new ways of being and living.’
Katie Tobin reviews Helen Charman’s Mother State.
Interview | Purgatory by the Sea: Jon Fosse in Conversation
‘To me, writing is best described as listening. And at a certain point it is as if the text is already written: it exists out there somewhere, and I just have to write it down before it disappears.’
Zadie Loft interviews Jon Fosse.
Interview | Laughter and Tears: Alejandro Zambra in Conversation
‘Saying that fiction is untrue, that it is something of a lie, is as imprecise as saying that a song is a lie, that a joke is a lie, that a painting is a lie.’
An interview with Alejandro Zambra by Magnus Rena.
Fiction | Woof-Woof-Woof-Woof-Woof by Phoebe Hurst
‘When The Reverend was preaching, I had to dare myself to look at him. But then it would happen and it was never as bad as I feared. ‘
New short fiction by Phoebe Hurst.
Review | Poor Art, Rich Rewards by Daisy Sainsbury
‘Arte povera and its afterlife strike me as exemplary of the fate of counter-current movements that so quickly lose their revolutionary value and are subsumed into the institutions they originally set out to critique.’
Daisy Sainsbury reviews ‘Arte Povera’.
Review | Blood and Coal by RC Birchley
‘But amid all of this, there is an undercurrent of something other.’
RC Birchley reviews Sue Harper’s ‘Blood and Coal’.
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.
Fiction | Submechanophobia by Charlotte Tierney
‘Bill had never worried about how others received him, or his behaviour. He prioritised, instead, being as much himself as possible, for the sake of his art.’
New fiction by Charlotte Tierney.
Interview | The Garden as Political Metaphor with Olivia Laing and Richard Porter
‘The garden is a space to think differently, to understand time differently and to understand how to cope with abundance, followed by loss, followed by abundance, followed by loss. It’s an anti-capitalist clock.’
Olivia Laing and Richard Porter in conversation with Zadie Loft.
Interview | ‘Freedom in Multitudes’: Explorations of the Self with Sosa Omorogbe
‘The fragmented self is the self. That feeling of not being one thing but multiple threads intertwined into one physical, corporeal form, that is what it feels like to be human. I don’t think traditional portraiture where the figure is posed and sat always captures that.’
Zadie Loft speaks to gallerist and curator, Sosa Omorogbe.
Interview | Selva Almada: Seven Questions
‘I’m certainly curious about the world of men, in how they act and why. Through my fiction and my imagination, I can find the nuance, the gaps and the hollows, the contradictions.’
Selva Almada in conversation with Konrad Muller (tr. James Appleby).
Interview | Offer Waterman and Francis Outred on Auerbach’s London
‘In a world where a lot of contemporary art is consumed at the point of making and many artists are very young, we have an artist who is still with us – at 93 years old – with seven decades behind him, still drawing.’
Offer Waterman and Francis Outred discuss Frank Auerbach’s landscapes of London.
Fiction | Harbour Colours by Eloise Vaughan Williams
‘Blue thinks Red might be a person who dislikes even the bones of himself. That he also worries he might be missing something, or rather hopes he is, instead of believing he has broken it. Blue thinks they might be alike in that.’
New fiction by Eloise Vaughan Williams.
Interview | Forward Prize for Best First Collection: Jasmine Cooray and Kelly Michels
‘The concept of limitation definitely had a profound effect on the writing. There have been so many points in my life where I have had to recognise that there will be no resolution.’
The fourth and final in our Forward Prize for Poetry interview series, Jasmine Cooray and Kelly Michels.
Fiction | Index of Intersecting Qualia by Mimi Kawahara
‘I’ve always been in the minority, you say with defiant pride, upon reading Hippocrates’ conclusion that one third of patients get better on their own, one third don’t respond to treatment, and one third benefit from it.’
New fiction by Mimi Kawahara.
Poetry | Two Poems by Tim Tim Cheng
‘For the grass to reach the mirror, you cannot be proximate. / It is generous. Both of us, almost missing. / We seem not to go or stay.’
Two poems by Tim Tim Cheng.
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.
Review | Formal People by Hester Styles Vickery
‘Conversations around her work centre on her significant success, her Marxist politics, but rarely her technique. Rooney’s critics seem reluctant to talk about her sentences, which is unfortunate, because the sentences are very good.’
Hester Styles Vickery reviews Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo.
Interview | Between Anger and Prayer: Camille Ralphs in Conversation
‘I think my overwhelming feeling writing that poem and reading it out now is one of ‘trappedness’. Anger at being trapped in the world, in a situation which makes no sense, with faculties that cannot make sense of it. The other question is why?’
Shoshana Kessler speaks to poet and editor, Camille Ralphs.
Fiction | About Lucy by Emily Waugh
‘When so many bad things have happened to someone, they are automatically a good person. You have to be nice to them. Their misfortune creates a magnetic field of deflection.’
New Fiction by Emily Waugh.
Review | A Competition Without Rules by Guy Stagg
‘O’Neill’s true target in Godwin is not the excesses and abuses of the modern football industry, but the little lies with which the characters serving that system justify their crimes.’
Guy Stagg reviews Godwin.
Interview | Forward Prize for Best Single Poem Performed: Leyla Josephine and Michael Pedersen
‘Poetry is always trying to capture the experience of living a human life, which is an impossible task. Poets come close, but of course, always fail. Life is simply too complicated, too individual, too big. But the best poets, in my opinion, are the ones who manage to conjure feeling and keep mystery. And, of course, sprinkle in some humour to not take the whole thing too seriously.’
The third in our Forward Prize for Poetry interview series, Leyla Josephine and Michael Pedersen.