‘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.
‘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.
‘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.
‘When I passed the baby to her to hold, she did so with the bored detachment of a taxi driver holding a name card at an airport.’
New short fiction by Gráinne O’Hare.
‘It took years – time, distance and eventually death – before I even approached a comprehension of my father, and of course, in lieu of any verification on his part, it could only ever be speculation. Still, and but so, I tried.’
Short fiction by JL Bogenschneider.
‘It was as if I was being allowed an insight into the very core of their lives, and I felt closer to them than to the people I actually lived with.’
Short fiction by Eddie Creamer, runner up in The London Magazine Short Story Prize 2024.
‘I know about things left too long to boil, things too hot to ever touch. I know there’s a kind of human who can take a single moment and make it better just by living it.’
New short fiction by Kerry Hood.
‘Maybe they just won’t look up, he said. Many people go their whole lives without looking up.’
New short fiction by Joshua Jones.
‘I cannot believe what I’m seeing, but there is no doubting it: roses are falling from the sky; the sort to fill vases or lay on gravesides: red and white, peach and pink, full-headed, green tear-drop leaves spaced along thorny stem.’
New fiction by Rupert Dastur.
‘With relief, with childlike awe, she understood that her entire life had been determined by a grammatical error.’
An extract from Dengue Boy by Michel Nieva.
‘It wasn’t that I didn’t love Margot. I did, desperately, but watching people make fun of her made me feel better about myself. It was one of the only things that did.’
Short fiction by Marni Appleton. An extract from ‘I Hope You’re Happy’.
‘I hope there is something just beyond the purview of my language that goes further than just wanting to be a woman and not always having been one.’
New short fiction by Beth Preece.
‘In my calculations for our one-year stay here, I didn’t consider whether the layered emotional outfits I’ve assembled for my parenting persona in Rio might not fit here.’
Short fiction by Idra Novey.
‘Not until later does he pose to himself the question: why does he imagine it is a woman bound in the basement and not a man?’
New fiction by A. E. Macleod.
‘Sometimes he would sit on the sofa in his dressing gown and mumble something about the emotional labour of the commute.’
New fiction by Theo Macdonald.
‘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.
‘The baby has come to understand the world as reducible into categories, an indefinitely vast space populated by discrete objects with dedicated names and stable locations.’
Runner-up in the Brick Lane Bookshop Short Story Prize 2024: Louie Conway’s ‘Un’.
‘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.
‘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.
‘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.
‘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.
‘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.
‘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.
‘People on the street in the daytime come with blurred edges, their faces are grey scribbles in the air.’
New fiction by Cheryl Follon.
