‘Focusing on speech marks alone overlooks what novels can do in their absence. What if ambiguity is the point?’
Kira McPherson on speech marks, or lack thereof.
Interview | Ella Walker on Pasolini and punk
‘I’ve always loved reading. One source of inspiration for me is Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, particularly ‘The Wife of Bath’ prologue. I loved her gruesome language and her humour. She’s a very powerful character.’
Katie Tobin speaks to Ella Walker.
Review | Beyond Constructed Film Sets by Sara Quattrocchi Febles
‘Once he’d take the required photographs, he’d move around the set like an angel. No one would see or notice him. He managed to camouflage himself to capture the perfect moment.’
Sara Quattrocchi Febles on Sergio Strizzi at The Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art.
Essay | Meat Space by Hugh Foley
‘Ultimately, I think, in this moment, the body doesn’t matter. It’s just another thing to upload onto the cloud. Or rather, it matters because it’s the ultimate thing to upload. The realest thing.’
Hugh Foley on bodybuilding influencers.
Interview | Beverley Bie Brahic on Nostalgia and Home by Victoria Modi-Celda
‘One wonderful thing about translation is that the original poem gives you the shape of the beast: ‘all’ the translator has to do is play with the words.’
Victoria Modi-Celda talks to Beverley Bie Brahic.
Review | Dreamland Laid Bare by Miracle Romano
‘In this chaotic admixture of miserable players, it is sometimes difficult to distinguish between aggressor and victim. This leads to the chilling thought that when injustice is empowered and left unchecked, corruption becomes a cycle.’
Miracle Romano reviews Ronaldo Soledad Vivo Jr.’s The Power Above Us All.
Fiction | Love: Eight Definitions by Eamon Doggett
‘She did the work during the daytime: dressing him, washing his hair, and giving him his medicine. Most of that time Adrian can’t collate and discern any linearity, nor can he describe with any material details its happenings.’
New fiction by Eamon Doggett.
Review | Grapes of Wrath by Charlie Taylor
‘Experience is one thing, but facing the cold facts of the world’s material processes is something else.’
Charlie Taylor reviews Munir Hachemi’s Living Things.
Fiction | The Writer by Cheryl Follon
‘People on the street in the daytime come with blurred edges, their faces are grey scribbles in the air.’
New fiction by Cheryl Follon.
Interview | Forward Prize for Best Single Poem Written: Vasiliki Albedo and Lisa Kelly
‘I’m moving more towards how a writer frames their work to suggest how it might be received – just as Marcel Duchamp presented readymade objects as art. If you take a piece of found text and call it a poem, it will alter how the reader perceives it.’
The first in our Forward Prizes for Poetry interview series.
Review | Ex on the Beach by Marina Scholtz
‘For a book to be a truly good reissue it should seem outrageous and unjust that it fell out of print in the first place, and Ex-Wife is exactly that.’
Marina Scholtz reviews Ursula Parrott’s Ex-Wife.
Review | In the Eye of the Storm by Callum Tilley
‘It is not displaying tension between styles, but rather the artistic absorption of them.’
Callum Tilley reviews In the Eye of the Storm at the Royal Academy.
Fiction | Consultation by Leeor Ohayon
‘He told me to come round, said this time he wanted to watch me with others.’
Fiction by Leeor Ohayon.
Essay | Tory Britain’s Literary Post-Mortem by Katie Tobin
‘In the time that has lapsed between Evenings and Weekends’ period setting and today, the world has been rocked by a global pandemic, and seen Britain usher in four new Prime Ministers, one of whom was outlasted by a Tesco lettuce.’
Katie Tobin on austerity’s literary legacy.
Poetry | Two Poems by James Appleby
‘I’ll be young with you still. One stroke of pen / cancels a decade: our unfaithful room / evicts new tenants, guts our suitcases.’
Two poems by James Appleby.
Poetry | Tyrant by Meredith MacLeod Davidson
‘Did you know the T-Rex / was quite likely an excellent swimmer? / Its skeletal frame light enough to float.’
New poetry by Meredith MacLeod Davidson.
Essay | Notes on Context by Callum Tilley
‘Entwining deeply personal stories into a tense political context allows for the exploration of the effects of this context at an individual level that, while fictionalised, is also infused with reality.’
Callum Tilley on politics in art.
Essay | Voice Memories by Ian Wang
‘They are less interviews than they are extended passages of domestic caterwauling. A sound editor would have an aneurysm.’
Ian Wang on voice memories.
Review | Blue Correspondents by Oluwaseun Olayiwola
‘For all the shagginess of its visual form, from the actor’s remarkable ability to clip presence from scene to scene, to the visual grandeur of the stage’s concomitant nuts and bolts, it is a suave progression of circumstance and feeling.’
Oluwaseun Olayiwola reviews Bluets at the Royal Court Theatre.
Reviews | Kafka’s Sentence by Jack Barron
‘Just as there are good and bad interpretations, there are simply good and bad misinterpretations, and discriminating between them is the key to seeing Kafka’s obscurity clearly. ‘The Metamorphosis’ is as much about unimaginability as it is boundlessly applicable allegory.’
Jack Barron reviews Kafka’s Diaries and Metamorphoses: In Search of Franz Kafka.
Interview | John Barnie on Welsh Identity, Dystopian Verse and the Anthropocene
‘When you are writing you are immersed in the moment. All that matters is the poem.’
Rose Brookfield speaks to John Barnie.
Interview | Eline Arbo on staging Annie Ernaux’s The Years
‘But still, it has this core of universality because it is written in the collective form. We can project our own lives into her stories because she allows us to do so. She invites us in with this ‘we’.’
Eline Arbo on staging The Years, at the Almeida Theatre from 27 July.
Fiction | Flamboyant by Patrick Cash
‘He wondered if it became, at some point, too late to reclaim who you want to be. Maybe some people are just Frankenstein’s personalities, stitched together through the limbs of borrowed traits.’
New fiction by Patrick Cash.
Essay | Izabela the Valiant: The Story of an Indomitable Polish Princess by Adam Zamoyski
‘The joy of taking on a subject not previously covered by historians is that one can approach it with an open mind, uncovering and assessing virgin sources like an archaeologist.’
Adam Zamoyski on Izabela Czartoryska.