Essay | The Ring by Tomoé Hill
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 [...]
Poetry | A Newer Wilderness by Nicola Healey
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...
Review | The Flesh To The Frame at Opera Gallery London
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...
Review | Known Unknowns at The Saatchi Gallery
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...
SYRIA by Ghayth Armanazi
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...
Essay | Memories of the 60s by Leonard Quart
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...
Fiction | Blue Nude by Charlotte Newman
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 [...]
Review | The Water We Were All Swimming In by Katie...
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,...
Dark Fairytale – Review of McQueen at the Theatre Royal Haymarket
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...
Review | Mad, Bad, and Dangerous to Know by Colm Tóibín
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,...
Interview | Ra Page on Stories of Uprising and Protest in...
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 [...]
Faith Healer at Donmar Warehouse
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,...
The Power by Naomi Alderman
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...
Review | Home by Amanda Berriman
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...
Poetry | The Rolling Head by Rómulo Bustos Aguirre (trans. Christina...
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...
Review | Bill Viola / Michelangelo: Life, Death, Rebirth at Royal...
In a contemporary art world dominated by video art (as shown by the 2018 Turner Prize) Bill Viola / Michelangelo: Life, Death, Rebirth presents a...
Internet Poetry by Paul Gittins
In the seventh of his twelve lectures as Oxford Professor of Poetry, the late Geoffrey Hill took issue with the Poet Laureate, Carol Ann...
Review | Grace Under Pressure: David Foster Wallace on Tennis
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 [...]
Interview | Éric Chevillard on Experimental Writing by Erik Martiny
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...
Essay | Mother’s Desk by Vanessa Nicolson
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...
Poetry | Joan Howson’s Cottage by Michael Henry
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...
Review | The Only Story by Julian Barnes
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...
The First Bad Man by Miranda July
Cheryl Glickman — isolated, alone and with no true friends to speak of — is an acute example of the lonesome modern narrator. Miranda...
Madness by Patrick Cash
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...