‘Maybe they just won’t look up, he said. Many people go their whole lives without looking up.’
New short fiction by Joshua Jones.
Fiction | Roses, Falling by Rupert Dastur
‘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.
Fiction | Dengue Boy by Michel Nieva
‘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.
Fiction | Margot by Marni Appleton
‘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’.
Fiction | Anywhere Apart from Here by Beth Preece
‘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.
Fiction | Signal by A. E. Macleod
‘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.
Fiction | I Just Died by Theo Macdonald
‘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.
Fiction | Un by Louie Conway
‘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’.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Fiction | Some Woman Doing Crazy Dancing by Jane Messer
‘She was so very, very fortunate, yes, she was.’
New fiction by Jane Messer.
Fiction | Volunteers by Laura Shaine Cunningham
‘For several long minutes, nothing changed. We seemed to be opposite and equal forces.’
New fiction by Laura Shaine Cunningham.
Fiction | Of Milky Kindness
‘Then I told him he looked like a lop-sided Trent Reznor and didn’t he want to kiss me? This is a kind of flirting. This has never not worked.’
Fiction by Sarah Fletcher.
Fiction | That Time After Dinner by Jago Rackham
‘“It’s your birthday tomorrow,” said my mother. “Did you know the Jesuits say ‘Give me a child before the age of seven and he’ll be mine forever?’” “Who are the Jesuits?” “Priests.” “Oh.” She tousled my hair. “Thank god you’ve met none.”’
New fiction by Jago Rackham.
Fiction | The Singing Tribe by Benjamin George Coles
‘I mean something closer to: am I a good person? Am I sincere and devout to those things in my life that I ought to be?’
New fiction by Benjamin George Coles.
Fiction | After Sunlight by Gary Finnegan
‘The few days turned to weeks and years and it was a decade before we spoke about the future, a conversation focused on the past.’
New fiction by Gary Finnegan.
Fiction | Baa by Lilia Salammbô Fetini
‘You grow up in poverty. You are told you are lucky, and that luck is why you are the only child in the family who gets an education. You have a natural sense for numbers, and feel that luck is a question of numbers. It is a question of the number of years separating you and your siblings from the source of luck.’
New fiction by Lilia Salammbô Fetini.
Fiction | People Who Can Love by Sarah Turner
‘I’d heard about the surgery even before Cathy reminded me of it. They’d discussed it on the radio one morning, and I’d half listened as I was making coffee, but it seemed experimental – outlandish, even – and I assumed the idea would flicker, smoke, and then go out, like the time they talked about finding volunteers to go to space forever.’
New fiction by Sarah Turner.
Fiction | Noah’s Wife by Katherine Robinson
Katherine Robinson Noah’s Wife . . The day of the flood, wind roared in, carrying the cold of the sea.…