‘The defining sensibility of Cole’s visual argot is a timeless ephemerality. His photographs twin the incidental with a profound belief in beauty.’
Sylee Gore reviews Pharmakon by Teju Cole.
Review | Suspensions of Disbelief by Stuart Walton
‘Eire’s aim in this capacious, deeply researched and often perplexing book is to account for episodes of the miraculous from a historian’s perspective, seen through the retrospective lens of what has become known, if not universally, as the post-secular age.’
Stuart Walton reviews They Flew: A History of the Impossible by Carlos Eire.
Review | Belonging to the Dead by Gary Kaill
‘Two recently published novels embrace ‘death is not the end’ as both axiom and narrative foundation stone, and traverse the great beyond to dizzying effect.’
Gary Kaill reviews The Earth is Falling by Carmen Pellegrino & It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over, Anne de Marcken.
Review | Bolaño’s Exquisite Corpse by Tommy Gilhooly
‘The short stories in this collection cannot, therefore, be read as lesser examples of Bolaño’s novels.’
Tommy Gilhooly on The Collected Stories of Roberto Bolaño.
Review | War and Peace? by Luke Warde
‘There is much in War that compels, especially what it reveals about Céline’s incipient, and already grim, worldview.’
Luke Warde reviews ‘War’.
Interview | Rose Electra Harris: Big Canvas, Bright Colours
‘One of the things that I get torn about is that I feel really lucky that I’m an artist, but often wonder if it’s quite a selfish thing to be doing.’
Zadie Loft speaks to Rose Electra Harris.
Review | All Is Not Well by Zadie Loft
‘In the first half, Helen’s pursuit of and infatuation for Bertram seems sweet, comical and harmless; by the second, her actions have been shown to be what they always were: sexual harassment and assault.’
Zadie Loft reviews All’s Well That Ends Well.
Interview | Orlando Reade in Conversation by Marina Scholtz
‘I was told very early on by people in publishing that there is no market for literary criticism – none.’
Marina Scholtz speaks to Orlando Reade.
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.
Poetry | Two Poems by Miruna Fulgeanu
‘Yes I understand the world; it doesn’t mean I want / to do it. It’s hard!’
Two poems by Miruna Fulgeanu.
Fiction | Reasons for Not Speaking by Amaan Hyder
‘But these are not just white people, these are queer people. And what is that supposed to mean? Is queer some reliable thing?’
Short fiction by Amaan Hyder, winner of The London Magazine Short Story Prize 2024.
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.
Interview | Eliza Clark: Seven Questions
‘There’s a great deal of horror to be found when desire is misaimed or curdles – our desires are often an expression of the systems of power we exist in.’
Eliza Clark interviewed by Zadie Loft.
Interview | Farkhondeh Ahmadzadeh on Manuscripts and Miniatures
‘In this complex world where human kind is divided into tiny sections, I hope we all can find the unity we are meant to have.’
Eric Block interviews artist Farkhondeh Ahmadzadeh and curator Esen Kaya.
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’.
Review | I for I: Occupations that Blind by Zoe Valery
‘The writing of Pleasure Gardens – and its reading – constitutes an act of resistance; a reclaiming of the digital narrative space that has been blacked out by the state and overwritten by its propaganda machine.’
Zoe Valery reviews ‘Pleasure Gardens’.
Review | His Words Among Mankind by Suzi Feay
‘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’.
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.