Latest Features

Fictions of Masculinity

Men’s bodies in this book, like their minds, are battered and bruised, often intentionally. It illuminates the reality of the strange “mythic realm of wrestling”: men throwing themselves around for other people’s — usually other men’s — entertainment. Reading the book, you realise how little this type of masculinity is seen in modern literature and wider culture.

Jonathan Aldridge reviews Wes Brown‘s Breaking Kayfabe.

Second Act of the Apostles

One afternoon, when the whole village had gathered to harvest from the back field, a few heads turned away from the potatoes and the gouts of earth, drawn towards the unusual sight of two men emerging from the densest part of our forest. The men were outlined and obscured by the golden light of a sunset just beginning. The first strode confidently ahead, swinging his arms wide as one step raised him high and the next dropped him lazily down. Behind him, where the darkness of the woodland gathers, came forth a stockier man, whose gait was level and steady, even as the two descended through the scree and weed of the village approach. With rain falling thick on the leaves and collecting in deep puddles between the furrows, we villagers were miserable and tired and the sight of the two men was as good an excuse as we would get to stop work for the day. So, despite the griping of our elders, we raised our hands in welcome. Soon the two strangers were in the field and their beards dripped with weak, cold ale, spilt from the common ladle, drawn from the bottom of the broad common jug.

A short story by Chris Kohler.

Millenial Edgelord: An Interview with Susan Finlay

When I was at art college, the question of Identity with a capital ‘I’ was a big thing. I remember Anouchka Grose coming into give a guest lecturer, and how she used the example of a shopping list to explain the ways in which identity can be regarded as being in a permanent state of flux: if the person who made the list was the same person as the one who arrived at the shop, then the list would be obsolete. Rather, you write things down to remind the future you of what the past you thought that they would want. This really stuck with me, not only the idea of different selves, but different selves leaving reminders for each other, and trying to predict who else they might become.

Andrew Gallix interviews Susan Finlay.

For My Money

I went up to the store—you know, to our place on the hill that sells groceries and roach bait and Trojans? That place. I went up there to lift a pint of smoke when no-one was looking but it drifted through my fingers before I got home, only a whiff of stink left to guilt me. If I’d had the cash, though, when I was up there at the store?

A short story by Carrie Cooperider.

Poem Brut #158 – Moons in Libra (European Poetry Festival edition)

Over a period of 6 weeks both artists wrote their dreams on a shared document, they responded to each others dreams in their night life and met in disguise as cats in a vitrine and in the gym. There was multiple modes of transport, shopping malls, bathrooms, blankets, wounds and windows. The past present and future merged. After about writing 20 pages of dreams, both wrote each other a poem based on the others dreams and this was their collaborative gift to the audience and each other. The poems are overlayed with dream drawings.

In the 158th of the Poem Brut series, new poetry by Agnes Schneidewind and Martina O’Shea.

A Reckoning

Everybody out there was saying, You have to reckon with it, with hands waving up to the power lines. It was assumed to mean everything, and everybody wanted you to reckon with everything. Many gave it a good shot, wrestling with it or trying to wrangle it, but these actions seemed to be avoiding the initial call. I wanted to try, it was time for a reckoning, but I wasn’t a cowboy and I couldn’t wrangle the stars. I made a few half-hearted attempts before. With dad, with war, with work. I wasn’t exactly ready, and they led me nowhere. You burn out from a false reckoning.

A short story by Jonathan Gaboury.

Ana World

I was looking in the mirror when Ana posted the story online. The employee bathroom was dimly lit with old fluorescents, a small, two-stalled room tucked behind the gift shop. The girl in the mirror wore a blue button-down shirt and the clip-on tie they gave all the gallery attendants after Rachel showed up to the press preview wearing a necklace made from real human teeth. I made the girl in the mirror smile, turning the corners of my mouth up. I made her frown.

A short story by Claudia Ross.

Last Call

So that’s it for another year. The months of Capitalist foreplay, the gluttonous slew of foodporn ads, the same golden turkeys being sliced over and over as if they haven’t already suffered enough, the same old corks popping from the same green bottles, spunking fizz that’s long since gone flat; all that manufactured excitement, kids getting themselves sick with it, adults stressed out of their heads with the hassle of it all, the secrecy, stashing presents around the house away from prying eyes and rooting hands, wondering in panic what it is they know they’ve forgotten but just can’t place, nerves jangled from the sensory bombardment and the incessant orders from all around to spend, spend, spend; all that, and here’s where I end up every single time — half-cut, fully stuffed and a hundred percent alone.

By Stu Hennigan.

Instrument

This instrument will measure your anxiety. And this machine will measure your pains. This machine will measure your memory. And this instrument will measure your forgetting. This instrument will swab for electrical. This machine will measure your helplessness. This instrument will measure your violence. This instrument will measure your shame. This machine will measure your stardust. And this instrument will measure your splinters. This instrument will swab for chemical. This machine will measure your stasis. This instrument will measure your fear. And this instrument will measure your poverty. This instrument will measure your heartbeat. This instrument will measure your silence. And this instrument will measure your melody. And this machine will measure your dreams…

By Tim Etchells.

Art Crimes

For many years my grandfather Robert Parsil, an artist whose career was interrupted and derailed by World War II, was a man (in the storehouse of our family myths) with a ferocious temper. His were crimes of anger, born of art. In our family, depending on who was telling the story and in what context, this temper was described as something as extreme as rages, or as mild as moods. I’d seen both, growing up. Helping him in his art studio in the late 1970s — when I was thirteen or fourteen years old — I’d watched him (with a mixture of fear and awe) hurl a can of varnish into the ceiling rafters, flip over his work bench, and roar at me to Get Out. I chalked it up to this is just how artists work…

By Nicholas Rombes.

A Runaway Train

Yet if the scandalous and exorbitant interplay of Fassbinder’s era, output, and personal life resembles a thousand mirrors, Penman’s book is like the debris of a single shattered one. Taking the form of 450 numbered, fragment-like passages, it’s pitched as both a work of film criticism and impressionistic memoir (autobiographical details range from brief descriptions of growing up in the 60s and 70s on British air force bases to the experience of writing the book during the pandemic). But with dozens and dozens of dashed off literary, filmic, and musical references and allusions, the book is more like a slow zoom-out to reveal Penman’s chock-a-block bookshelf, diligently filled with high- and low-brow books, DVDs, and records spanning genres and decades. We ultimately lose sight of both Fassbinder and Penman; it becomes writing for the sake of referencing.

Jamie Aylward reviews Ian Penman‘s Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors.

Margaret C. Anderson and The Little Review

Throughout the history of The Little Review, government and legal systems used blankness against them, such that blankness became censorship. It’s interesting to think about the ways the editors use blankness as something that seems in fact very full, pregnant with possibility and meaning. Like Wolfgang Iser’s notion of the constitutive blank, vacancies/empty space actually help build up a new aesthetic object. The blank issue remains a line of flight, a point in the story that remains open, where anything could have happened, and where becoming itself was what was crystallized.

Emily Friedman on a modernist journal.