Latest Features

A Trip to Ripple

In the early evening we decided to head to Ripple itself for something to eat. I wore a shirt from Boden so as to blend in with the locals, then wondered if I was too smart; I shouldn’t have attempted the first nor worried about the second. We walked down a single-tracked lane between high hedgerows and trees, past a small complex of renovated red-brick outbuildings called The Granary and The Stables. On the B road was a short row of new builds and the village pub. The pub was called The Railway. The front room was full of boomers in trousers in every shade of red, and as we entered we were given the once/twice-over. The people behind the bar were as friendly as it’s possible to be without giving off so much as a joule of warmth. We had prawn cocktail, squid rings, steak and a burger.

By Charlie Hill.

Police, Punk, and Crosswords: An Interview with Tony White

I think that’s a reality of policing. Not just undercover policing. The job requires a kind of professional mask, a professional, and procedural carapace that an experienced police officer will adjust according to the situation. They’re well trained in such procedures. And I wanted to reflect on that kind of life. To come back to Javier Cercas’ idea of the ‘blind spot’ briefly, undercover police, whatever they were doing, were putting themselves in positions of extreme risk: risk of discovery, violence, and in some cases, risk of death. And they were also breaking the law. But they were doing these terrible things and putting themselves at risk because – in their eyes – they were the good guys. Rex, I’m sure, would think of himself as one of the good guys. But the evidence doesn’t bear that up, you know?

Tony White interviewed about his new novel, Phantom at the Feast, by James Riley.

Drug and Prison Stories: An Interview with William S. Hayes

It was in prison that I began to write regularly and it was often smut. Penthouse Forum type shit. After doing time in numerous facilities, and getting clean, I began to think about writing more. Two friends had written books — American Junkie by Tom Hansen and American Demon by Jack Grisham — and after reading them I knew it was time. I began posting little pieces on social media and my friends told me to write it down before I forgot it. So I did. I was working graveyard and put it down on four notebooks — pen to paper. I’ve always loved drug and prison stories and I knew with my experiences I had plenty of material.

William S. Hayes interviewed by John Wisniewski.

There Are Further Zones

The scar and its synthetic monofilament sutures served as the blueprint for an impossible metropolis, its keloid ridges rising into serrated spires that defied human geometry. Under his fingertips, the skin pulsed with a cold, metallic autonomy, suggesting a labyrinthine city designed by a malign intelligence – or a hydrocephalic child – to house the anxieties colonising his adhesiolytic abdomen. He sensed the surgery as a structural intrusion – the implantation of a sightless, erotic citadel within the interstitial tissue of his core. He imagined the sutures tightening – tension cables, anchoring this parasitic architecture deep into his viscera, preparing his frame to serve as the shuddering host for a future anatomy that he could no longer recognise as his own.

By Steve Finbow.

Joanna Rosenfeld – The Resonant Void – George Berger Column

I want to start by saying something that will make you read the rest of this column, so let me say this:

Joanna Rosenfeld is the most intense, brave and astonishing performer I’ve seen on a stage in the last 30 years, maybe longer. In any discipline, on any level.

By George Berger.

The Jaguar’s Roar: Introduction

For [Micheliny] Verunschk, the images in the São Paulo exhibition became an obsession. ‘The figures were very familiar to me,’ she said in a 2021 interview, ‘but finding them there, in the original, their faces looking at me, it was disturbing.’ She visited the exhibition countless times over several years, trying to understand the nature of this disturbance, its origin. As a trained historian, she said, her first impulse was to conduct research, to dig for whatever information might be available about the children. But she’s also a poet and a novelist. Not finding much recorded about the two, she began to write their story, weaving together the fictional and the archival to shape one version – her version – of what might have been.

Read the introduction to The Jaguar’s Roar (Dead Ink, 2026) by Juliana Barbassa, who translated the novel.

Petite Artillery

I am a dog.
I am rabid.
I bark, I howl, I bare my fangs.
Spit drips from my mouth.
I feel my anger boiling in black froth toward every living thing.
As I run, I smell the fear and dread of people.
One girl’s scent draws me in.
I sink my teeth into her soft, welcoming thigh.

A short story by Greta Kaluževičiūtė.

Minute 9: U.S. Go Home

Alain is all awkward points – a rangy frame on clothes hanger shoulders. He’s got a squint like Eastwood’s but isn’t handsome with it. Even as the verse amps up, in this moment of ostensible release, his arms pivot around a locked torso, as if this room were a cell barely large enough to contain him. And it’s here, in this cell, in this body, that Alain claims his authority over the forces that still linger in his country. Late in the film, he will refuse a friendly gesture from Capt. Brown (Vincent Gallo) with “I’m Communist. I don’t drink Coca-Cola.”

Michael Ewins on U. S. Go Home by Claire Denis.

The Musket Ball

The musket ball.

The museumgoer stares at it, a dull but once deadly sphere sitting stately and harmless in a glass case. A Rust Belt museum housed in a former Gilded Age tycoon’s manor. The exhibit is about instruments of war. The evolution of war. The musket ball. Its texture compelling. The surface of the moon, its myths and mysteries.

The museumgoer stares.

A short story by Kent Kosack.

The Meta-ropolitan Police – Clues, Codes, and the Algorithmic Infosphere

The past haunts the book, the London of Chris Petit’s Robinson or the multi-layered, mythic ruins of Michael Moorcock’s Mother London, or the time-shifting echoes of Iain Sinclair’s White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings. Phantom at the Feast – like London – is built on top of its own ghosts – The Fountain in the Forest. Every alleyway, every sentence, is an archive of financial fraud, human trafficking, pornography, and the mappings of storyline in the previous novel. Every brick in the city, every word on the page, retains the vibration of the past, one can still hear The Clash’s 1985 busking tour – a ragged, acoustic ghost trailing through the concrete poured over the corpse of punk.

Steve Finbow reviews Phantom at the Feast by Tony White.

Spiritus Mundi

After we sent the billionaires to Mars we sent the managers up into the mountains to plant trees and out onto the prairies to sow wildflowers, and although later the new forests grew up in unexpectedly tidy rows and the milkweed and the columbine and the goldenrod and the bergamot were all organized by color no one really minded, certainly not the bees. We were poorer, it is true, but even those of us that had been very comfortable before had to admit it was a better arrangement, that it had to be done, that once things began to change for the worse as they did, we all just needed to get used to being poor together. I felt sadder for the people who had never been as rich as I had been and could now never hope to know what it was like to see a sunset on a beach a thousand miles from home, or go skiing in the Rockies, or even to have a little piece of land to call their own, than I did for those who were even richer than I was, and who lost cottages and jet skis and walk-in closets and millions and millions of air miles, but that was just me. Some people felt more sorry for the rich folk than they did the poor and I get that too.

A short story by Robert G. Penner.

A Walk

First thing: you. That old void in your head. It’s winter. The sun is an itch in your eye. There’s construction, of course; the sound wakes you as the streaky slam of your loosely hinged door concurs with the recognition of some meathead from Staten Island bent grimacing over a jackhammer that shatters the sidewalk and with it any hope of civility for the day, or room for thought, normotension, tinnitus-free ears—no, this probably prejudiced Italian who likely shares Nonna’s basement with his wife is shuddering and quivering above the destruction of the little patch of land that has had more ground broken than anywhere in the world besides some nameless city block in Gaza—proving your conspiratorial landlord right, all building projects in the city are scams, snow jobs for the mafia or the liberal elite or whites—he—Greek—somehow considering himself exempt—colluding to ensure everyone under the table is getting theirs except you and him—

A short story by Charles Hawes.