Latest Features

The Nothing-Something of Loren Ipsum

Gallix’s novel explores a nothing-something analogous to the one Ophelia’s utterings become, asking in its first chapter, “what is lost when nothing is lost? When it becomes something?” The question here, posed by the novelist Sostène Zanzibar, refers to a note that reads “NOTHING IS LOST” and is found on the corpse of the murdered, we learn later, “Solange de la Turlute, the controversial boss of one of France’s largest family-owned publishing houses,” the first in series of murders, mostly of authors. But the question resonates beyond this context and seems to serve as the grounding question of the entire novel, “the book you are currently reading, which . . . is not the book I wanted to write,” the author, Adam Wandle — whom Ipsum is in Paris researching for a book and whose works provide slogans for the group behind the murders — asserts, but in such a way as to make ”the porous borders” between character — here Wandle — and author —Gallix — “almost indistinguishable,” to appropriate phrases of a passage from Loren Ipsum that blurs, in a different manner, the distinction between fictional and nonfictional worlds.

Albert Rolls reviews Loren Ipsum by Andrew Gallix.

Accessories to the Myth

She believed in the myth of herself. She believed it with such steel-eyed commitment that we couldn’t help but be drawn in. The sheer force of her belief scattered questions and repelled doubts, at least during the time we were in her presence. And did it matter, if we began to wonder about this or that when we were alone, when her stories cooled in the stillness of the walk home? Or if two women, over coffee, talked about what a self-satisfied bitch she was? If they asked, who did she think she was kidding with those microbladed brows and that wrap dress that gaped at the tits? She was forty-five if she was a day. Did it mean anything at all when that man with the voluptuous accent dismissed everything she’d ever said because he could see the lace edges of her knickers peeking over the top of her too-tight jeans? Not when we were with her. She wouldn’t allow us to think any of that mattered. She’d lock onto our gazes and smile her corrupted smile and tell us to stay until we became a part of it. And we wanted to. God, we wanted to.

A short story by Lynsey May.

Delirious New Lynn: A Field Guide to a West Auckland Suburb (Extract)

At first glance, then, a constructed swamp might look like a standard instance of White Guilt – like an attempt to atone (or, at least, to be seen atoning) for crimes committed against the landscape in the name of colonisation. But where we sought redemption there is plague and pestilence: Manawa reserve is a cesspit of avian botulism, littered with pukeko carcasses – their vital fluids seeping into the infill. Hence, this synthetic ecosystem looks more like a monstrous front, like a fragile stage-set for what Linda Hardy (after Ian Wedde) calls ‘natural occupancy,’ like a baroque folly on which for settlers and their descendants to dream ‘not that [the land] belongs to them, but that they belong to it’ – not that they have abused and desecrated the whenua (or else been the beneficiaries of its abuse and desecration) but that it welcomes them as its children.

Read an extract from Oscar Mardell‘s Delirious New Lynn.

Tracker on R*****

The person occasionally glances back at the dog. Because of these nervous looks, it could be construed that the animal is following this solitary human, unbid. Or the dog is passively walking, its walk happens to be behind the lone figure, they have, by chance, fallen into co-existing step, like a pair of clocks back-to-back in adjoining rooms. (Such clocks have been noted to synchronise, one slowing down and the other speeding up until both pendulums swing with the same (though opposite) trajectory, for no reason other than ‘Sympathetic Symmetry’.) Or perhaps their paths have coincidentally conjoined, producing a situation where the dog independently walks the same path as the person, albeit ten seconds or so later. Perhaps both states co-exist, like the superposed alive/dead cat.

A short story by Niamh Mac Cabe.

Exhibition Road: an Interview with Dorothy Max Prior

What became called ‘punk’ in 1976 was a slow-growing art and music movement, in London and New York, in the early to mid 1970s. Of course, at the time, we didn’t know it was going to burst out of the underground and become a massive worldwide youth movement. We were just enjoying being over-the-top and making art and music and having fun in a true DIY spirit.

At the time, the influences in the UK were a mix of the Warhol Factory scene (New York) and the gay disco and alternative performance art scene in the UK. So, everyone from Patti Smith and Debbie Harry and Richard Hell and the New York Dolls (NYC) to the London scene of Malcolm and Viv’s SEX shop on the King’s Road, the alternative art and performance scene at the ICA and other venues, artist Derek Jarman and Andrew Logan, gay clubs like Louise’s and Sombrero, people who were fans of David Bowie and Roxy Music wanting to do something of their own… It was a complete mish-mash of people and ideas, eventually getting summed up rather oddly as ‘punk’. By the time it had a name, it had become something else…

Dorothy Max Prior interviewed by John Wisniewski.

Ghosts in the Machine: Christopher Stead Interviewed

The physical roots of contemporary graffiti and raves can be traced back to the origins of urban exploration, which emerged as a response to boredom. Whether urban or suburban, the ghosts of post-industrialisation have left a myriad of abandoned warehouses, squats, and vacant spaces. Growing up, my friends and I had no access to museums or galleries. That just wasn’t part of our culture. We found our catharsis within the post-industrial playgrounds that stood as monuments to failed futures. These places of other were treasure troves of pieces from the early graffiti pioneers. By day, the decaying and ruined spaces would act as makeshift galleries for the city’s curious teenagers. Then, at night, the same spots would transform into pop-up clubs for illegal parties, something we had yet to learn about and were about to discover. These playgrounds allowed the city’s delinquents to unyoke themselves from their home lives, and the secret, concealed nature of these sanctuaries made us feel like it was our secret. The train lines, however, were no secret; they were just forbidden.

Lee Rourke interviews Christopher Stead.

M.V. + R.G.

I first met M.V. at the anniversary party of a mutual friend in one of the evil suburbs of Northern Virginia seven years ago. I was taking in the slanted rays of a sunset on the patio after a conversation with a man who made his living selling the unthinkable when she stepped outside to do likewise. Our ties to the man who invited us were weak enough that it took no time at all for the one between us to supersede him in importance. In only a few minutes we discovered shared interests in the cluster of red cedars lining the backyard, the writings of David Kilcullen, and the typologies of man that walk the streets of our nation’s capital. We both knew ourselves to be wastrels beneath contempt in a way nobody else in the room could imagine.

A short story by Nathan Jefferson.

Trees Don’t Grow to the Sky

Abundancy isn’t a prerequisite to being a family; no, family can be a single thing, alone and even small, provided that that lone even small thing is comfortable and happy by itself just being, but I don’t think any of us would have been and that was good and great because there were a lot of us making up ours; lots of types of us too, those being, in order of most to least common, Oak, Beech, Corsican Pine, Scots Pine, Fur, Holly, Birch, Alder, Larch, Spruce, Lime, Horse Chestnut, Sweet Chestnut, Ginkgo, and Californian Redwood—though the last were just two, standing like pillars on the outskirts of opposite sides of the grove to each other, middle trunks hidden in the upper foliage of much smaller trees but the rest of them impossible to hide so tall and thick and red were they, like the nose of an au naturel clown. We were a family through proximity but also friendliness, when you can’t move from one spot and when your arms move only from particularly strong winds or the clambering of particularly nimble visitors and when your bark is hard but what lies below is so soft it’s just crying out for love and affection, friendliness becomes a main part of your personality…

A short story by William Hayward.

Ordinary Bull

Ordinary People and Raging Bull couldn’t be more different in style or tone. Raging Bull is all blood, sweat and tears and wears its heart on its sleeve. The heart in Ordinary People is alive and well in Connie but is buried beyond all reach in the green, green lawns of Lake Forest. Ordinary People feels as if it was made in a different era – a slower, more buttoned-up, soporific world. No expressionistic flourishes here. No swearing, no violence, but behind the posh parties and white picket fences, we see that the lives of these three people are just as bent out of shape and broken as those of Jake LaMotta, his brother and his wife. No punches may be thrown in Ordinary People, but the body blows are there for all to see.

Richard Skinner on the late Robert Redford‘s Ordinary People.

Archimedes and I Share a Bath

Archimedes and I are in the bath as all great thinkers are. His body is grey and wrinkled in a way you only see with people who have been sat in the bath for two thousand two hundred and sixty-nine years. The fool is stuck in eternal Eureka with his balls hanging loose. They are extremely dangly. It is kind of obscene. It’s gravity, Archimedes says, when he sees me looking. Chin out, dirt-grey beard flung over his shoulder, prideful like he’s invented the term.

A short story by Hana White.

The Social Night: On Denis Belloc

It’s that which constrains him, honest man and writer, to gathering a kind of manna at a border from which almost nothing can be seen: that which flocculates when we write “tightening the nuts and bolts”, as he said, or, to quote Duras, “at the words’ crest”; there, where the black, horned body of what one has to write, that which no one can ever truly read, lurks. But whose business is that, after all? What counts is that you have danced with the moths, and are finally able to fall silent.

By Patick Autréaux (translated by Tobias Ryan).

The Threshold and the Ledger

Malina resembles Ulysses in another, crucial respect. Both novels contain autofiction about a writer poised on the threshold of producing a masterpiece. In this way McCarthy’s essay itself becomes a work, in and of itself, about the possibility of producing a great literary work and, in turn, about the premise for and possibility of all literature.

Peter Carty reviews Tom McCarthy‘s The Threshold and the Ledger.