‘So what is the power of literary fashion, then? For me it lies in its virtuality, that imaginary quality of the ekphrastic, something so beautiful that it cannot exist in real life as we know it on the page. That virtuality also ties into the codification of clothing, and how it might suggest something about its wearer without saying as much.’
Katie Tobin on the Bloomsbury Group and fashion.
‘I knew that the building had been turned into a block of luxury condos and bore no internal resemblance to the halls my favourite writers would have walked; and I knew it hardly mattered either way, that I could have curled up in Sylvia Plath’s unwashed sheets and it wouldn’t make me a better writer.’
New fiction by Gráinne O’Hare.
‘Seen from the other side of the Irish Sea, this looks like a courageous act, and one to wish for more often in English fiction.’
Guy Stagg reviews Colin Barrett’s Wild Houses.
‘I have been searching for the word to describe the feeling of wanting big things, a hunger that grows and surpasses what I have inherited.’
New fiction by Jimin Kang.
‘In other words, there is a love that waits, and it has been and is being published in Latvia – as well as elsewhere – right now, before our eyes.’
Ivars Šteinbergs on Latvian poetry.
‘She was going to have a large life, an important life. She could feel it.’
Fiction by Hadley Franklin, winner of the Desperate Literature Short Fiction Prize 2023.
‘I’d rather let roots slip between my ribs / and knit these bones into the black soil / to keep them still and ease what restlessness/ might remain.’
New poetry by Michael Bazzett.
‘Like clouds, I take my colour from the air.’
New poetry from Sylee Gore.
Pacifica Goddard on Hetch Hetchy & The Greatest Good
Patrick Cash reviews Isabel Waidner’s ‘Corey Fah Does Social Mobility’ and Alison Rumfitt’s ‘Brainwyrms’
Hugh Foley reviews Ben Lerner’s ‘The Lights’ and Timothy Donnelly’s ‘Chariot’
