‘There is much in War that compels, especially what it reveals about Céline’s incipient, and already grim, worldview.’
Luke Warde reviews ‘War’.
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 | 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 | 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.
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.
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.
Poetry | Two Poems by Tim Tim Cheng
‘For the grass to reach the mirror, you cannot be proximate. / It is generous. Both of us, almost missing. / We seem not to go or stay.’
Two poems by Tim Tim Cheng.
Essay | Bagel City by Hugh Foley
‘My job, when talking to my daughter, is to guess what she means, her job is to guess what I mean. We believe things about each other. But how do we have a concept of meaning before we have a whole language? When does an infant have a meaningful sense of meaning?’
Hugh Foley on Taylor Swift, Chat GPT and the broader uses and abuses of meaning.
Review | Formal People by Hester Styles Vickery
‘Conversations around her work centre on her significant success, her Marxist politics, but rarely her technique. Rooney’s critics seem reluctant to talk about her sentences, which is unfortunate, because the sentences are very good.’
Hester Styles Vickery reviews Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo.