Last week, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) reported a surprise 0.1% contraction in the UK economy. This year's list mirrors this trajectory. With 14 contributors, there has been a modest 6.67% decrease in output from Q4 2024; however, economic doomers ought to bear in mind that these are still historically high levels, only exceeded in 2022 and 2024. What trends have shaped our literary 2025? [read full essay]
This literary and cultural diversity of Birmingham and the UK has always attracted me to it. It is what I would love a cosmopolitan globe to be. Oh, the world cuisine you get served in London and Brum, are there cities to match their culinary diversity anywhere else? Yet, this was also why I was all the more shocked when I read recently the statements of Shadow Secretary of State for Justice and Conservative MP Robert Edward Jenrick on the subject of Handsworth, Birmingham. Jenrick, as is now widely known, had complained in a speech of a ‘lack of integration’ in Handsworth. [read full column]
Hervé Guibert and Eugène Savitzkaya, trans. Christine Pichini, Letters to Eugène: Correspondence 1977–1987
reviewed by Rachel Dastgir
The Belgian poet Eugène Savitzkaya was 28 and living in Liège when he was drawn into an unexpected correspondence with a then 22-year-old Hervé Guibert. Guibert had published his first novel La Mort propagande in 1977, an astonishing debut and autofictional novel that described Guibert’s explosive and fragmentary encounters with both death and burgeoning sexuality, and was celebrated by fellow writers including Monique Wittig, Roland Barthes, and Michel Foucault. He was exciting and... [read more]
‘I remember everything,’ Emily LaBarge writes early on in Dog Days, her coruscating debut that is as much about writing as it is about trauma, grief, and the talismans of catharsis. ‘I live by this memory,’ she continues, ‘it forms such a core of my person, what I am able to write, what catches my attention, until all of a sudden there are some things I can’t remember at all.’
What happens when our memory of a certain event, ‘on the twenty-second day of December, 2009, at... [read more]
On the first Sunday of every month, academic and activist Morag Rose can be found walking, wandering, meandering, shuffling, or best of all loitering, down the streets of Manchester with like-minded loiterers of all sorts. Their walks — which have been taking place for 20 years – are guided and not-guided by different games, instructions, motivations, or lack thereof, with an ever-changing group of companions. Each experience of this collective loitering is ephemeral and unique.
Rose,... [read more]
Tom Crowley brings his daughter to Bring Your Daughter to Work Day, and she goes missing. But all is not as it seems. Each chapter is a monologue, either by Tom Crowley or someone who works with him, such as Kath Corbett, Steve the receptionist, an unnamed Liaison Officer, an unnamed AV technician, and finally an unnamed archivist who is assembling all the material we are reading. Tom Crowley is an angry and frustrated man — we get subtle hints of this when he’s at a train station and... [read more]
Amlanjyoti Goswami’s latest collection A Different Story returns to themes explored in previous work, which I think might be best described as a kind of secular spirituality. Meditations on the beauty of Delhi and the importance of poetry itself are conduits for deep feeling through which the speaker expresses a wish for connection. I have previously suggested that Goswami’s work is concerned with sincerity, but A Different Story clarifies his poetic vision, which I would argue becomes... [read more]
Katie da Cunha Lewin, The Writer’s Room: The Hidden Worlds That Shape the Books We Love
reviewed by Helena C. Aeberli
For the past few years I have been working at the exact same desk in my university library. Every morning I show up at 9am to claim my spot, glaring at any interlopers who so much as glance its way. I unpack my necessary detritus — notebook, KeepCup, grubby sticker-clad laptop — and settle down to work. The desk is university property, but to all intents and purposes, between 9 and 5 on the weekdays, it belongs to me. Friends know exactly where to find me if they need to borrow a charger or... [read more]
Joanna Walsh, Amateurs! How We Built the Internet and Why It Matters
reviewed by Christopher Webb
If you’re reading this, then no doubt you’ve heard the news by now: the internet is cooked.
Right now, it’s difficult to know how — or indeed if — the web will ever recover from the many skirmishes it’s fighting on various fronts (the ramping up of government regulation in certain states, the “enshittification” of private platforms and, perhaps most significantly, the attempts by the AI labs to divert all traffic away from traditional publishers and websites and towards their... [read more]
Richard Seymour, Disaster Nationalism: The Downfall of Liberal Civilization
reviewed by Tymek Woodham
The ever-widening gyre of late capitalism requires, in British-American academic David Harvey’s phrase, a fix. The rampant accumulation of wealth constantly threatens to expend itself through the production of self-made crises: the market’s invisible hand has trembled since birth. And just as capitalism seeks ‘spatial fixes’ in the form of national banks, supranational economic zones or temporary forms of fixed capital that ensure the auto-destructive mechanisms of accumulation do not... [read more]
Loren Ipsum is a number of extraordinary things: the daughter of a high-flying architect and a renowned landscape gardener, an alumna of the University of Oxford, a former model, a beloved children’s author, and even a bestselling novelist. Now she is a literary journalist to boot – a writer, that is, who writes about writers and writing (and whose work seems to feature exclusively in publications with names ending in ‘Review of Books’). She is, then, almost a fantasy or parody version... [read more]
Olga Tokarczuk, trans. Antonia Lloyd-Jones, House of Day, House of Night
reviewed by Jemima Skala
There is a necessary asynchrony to reading Olga Tokarczuk in English translation, an author with so many Polish-language novels in her back pocket, many of which have taken years to come to anglophone shelves. Readers who access her in her original language will have built a more chronological picture of her oeuvre over time; they will, perhaps, possess a knowledge of patterns, tropes, and recurring imagery as it has built on the strength of one novel to the next — her fascination with... [read more]
