Writing

I still have my wedding ring – platinum with a pear-shaped, grass-green tourmaline, and small diamond baguettes flanking either side, facets refracting both light and superficial values. Sometimes I take the cursed object from its black octagonal leather box with the gold bird on the lid, wondering what illness it slowly introduced to me in the guise of joy. ‘Green stones are bad luck,’ said a friend of my then-fiancé, on admiring my ring. It was automatic; one of [...]

Nicola Healey A Newer Wilderness ‘But Light a newer Wilderness / My Wilderness has made –’ – Emily Dickinson There is a world that must lie, always, just beneath and...

  David Kim Whittaker’s current exhibition THE FLESH TO THE FRAME reveals a powerful vortex of chaos and harmony. Presented in two parts In the...

In the current exhibit at the Saatchi Gallery, Known Unknowns, you are not meant to know of the artists. If you do, you’re missing...

SUFFER THE COUNTRY   Suffer the curled up corpses of the tortured Suffer the cluttered ranks of the bound and the beaten Suffer the pleading eyes of those...

Leonard Quart Memories of the 60s I have been trying hard to emotionally survive the Trump era, while living with feelings of revulsion and hopelessness about...

It was ironic, she thought. Her first shift at the museum was understaffed, it was just the two of them in ceramics. He was dark-lashed, very slight – given more to edges than the centre of things [...]

Katie da Cunha Lewin The Water We Were All Swimming In The Inland Sea, Madeleine Watts, Pushkin Press, 2021, 256pp, £8.99 (paperback) The Weak Spot, Lucie Elven,...

McQueen Theatre Royal Haymarket Limited run from 19th August Reviewed by Lauren Hepburn It's been five years since Lee McQueen took his life. The exquisite dress worn by...

Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know: The Fathers of Wilde, Yeats and Joyce, Colm Tóibín, Viking, 2018, pp.192, £14.99 Strolling through the Dublin where he once studied,...

Ra Page is the founder and CEO of Comma Press, a Manchester-based publisher specialising in short stories. He has edited many anthologies, including Protest: Stories of Resistance (2017), and Litmus (2011), an Observer Book of the Year. He coordinated Literature Northwest until it merged with Comma Press, and is a former director of Manchester Poetry Festival. Ra's latest collection, Resist: Stories of Uprising (2019), pairs fictional retellings of British protests through the ages with historical afterwords [...]

Lyndsey Turner’s revival of Brian Friel’s 1979 play uses the wisdom of age to give this oft dubbed “modern masterpiece” a dark depth, comedy,...

Some suggest that science fiction is a woman’s genre. In its purest form, sci-fi reimagines the structures of society and, in the process, creates...

Home is an overwhelming and important, gripping novel about a struggling family seen through the eyes of four-year old daughter, Jesika. Amanda Berriman has successfully taken...

Rómulo Bustos Aguirre (trans. Christina MacSweeney) The Rolling Head   to all the people in my country who have been disappeared   One man executed another man cleanly and extra-judicially...

In a contemporary art world dominated by video art (as shown by the 2018 Turner Prize) Bill Viola / Michelangelo: Life, Death, Rebirth presents a...

In the seventh of his twelve lectures as Oxford Professor of Poetry, the late Geoffrey Hill took issue with the Poet Laureate, Carol Ann...

Many writers have played tennis: Nabokov, Frost, Pound, Hemingway, Theodore Roethke, Randall Jarrell, even Solzhenitsyn in Vermont and Martin Amis today. Like poetry, tennis has strict rules and requires technical skill. It is individual yet social, aesthetically pleasing, intellectual, at times erotic. Despite its formal rituals [...]

Erik Martiny Éric Chevillard on Experimental Writing Éric Chevillard is one of the few great French experimental writers still writing today. His books are issued by...

Vanessa Nicolson Mother's Desk I’m sitting at my mother’s desk, overlooking the gardens of the Archaeological Museum. The ochre walls of the Museum to my right...

Michael Henry Joan Howson's Cottage This is Black Rock Sands that ............my parents walked to from their honeymoon hideaway. Those are the footprints they left ............on the sand. That is the...

The Only Story by Julian Barnes Readers who were a little disappointed by Barnes’s last political fiction The Noise of Time will be glad to...

Cheryl Glickman — isolated, alone and with no true friends to speak of — is an acute example of the lonesome modern narrator. Miranda...

There’s a stream by the Avon ward Where I stand to watch the water flow And unwind the whirlpools of my mind When it’s dark I let...