The Museum of Whales You Will Never See: Travels Among the Collections of Iceland

A. Kendra Greene is no stranger to museums.  As an artist and essayist who has spent most of her career dedicated to museums, she exhibits her own work in museums, and has managed many collections in the Museum of Contemporary Photography, the Chicago History Museum, and the University of Iowa Museum of Natural History. She has worked herself into them and around them.  This collection of essays takes Greene far from the United States, searching the curiosities of Iceland’s isolated museums.

Comic Timing (SHORTLISTED; FORWARD PRIZES FOR BEST FIRST COLLECTION 2021)

Holly Pester’s first collection Comic Timing proves to be a very thought-provoking volume and highly deserving of its shortlisting for the Forward Prize’s Best First Collection (2021). Pester creates a deeply personal yet political collection as she weaves between the two to gain a sense of self.

Life Without Air

Daisy Lafarge’s debut collection Life Without Air shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, is the ferment of a busy mind drawing from Louis Pasteur’s process of fermentation. Like the intersecting cells on the jacket, suggestive of their proximity, seven sections explore the complexity of human and ecological co-dependence, The inaugural poem, ‘Meridian Dream’, sits title-less Read More

Rendang

Sitting outside in a motorway cafe on a cool August evening after the mizzling rain, Kirsty Gunn and I talked intensely (as we do) about a novel we had difficulties with. Many of our exchanges were underpinned by the question: how does form and genre enable writing to tackle its subject matter successfully? Will Harris’ Read More

Make it Scream, Make it Burn: Essays

The essay’s star is in the ascendant. While there has been a long—even noble—tradition of essay writing going all the way back to Montaigne’s Essais, many people associate essays with classroom forms of assessment. Yet, of late, more writers have felt emboldened to call their prose ‘essays’. Make it Scream, Make it Burn is a Read More

West

Carys Davies has been honing her short form craft for many years, with two collections of short stories to her name and a slew of impressive writing credits that include the 2015 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award and the Royal Society of Literature’s V.S. Pritchett Prize. It should be no surprise then that her Read More

ALL FOR NOTHING

“Where do we come from? Where are we going?” Walter Kempowski’s final novel is encapsulated in these two questions. They sing an existential refrain throughout the entire text, like the chorus of a song. Faced with an uncertain future, Kempowski’s characters try to cling to fragments of the lives they once knew. A fractured, modernist Read More

THE STATE WE’RE IN: MAINE STORIES

“You don’t think things like this happen in woodsy Maine, off the beaten path? It sounds more like L.A.? In Maine, there may be a path, but it’s never clear […]” In The State We’re In: Maine Stories, we are transported to Maine – the coastal state that writer Ann Beattie recognises has the reputation Read More

FIRST LOVE (SHORTLISTED, 2017 BAILEYS WOMEN’S PRIZE)

Those familiar with Turgenev’s famous novella First Love may immediately expect a love affair of ill-fated, cataclysmic proportions. For those unfamiliar with the reference, the title of Gwendoline Riley’s First Love is cruelly, cleverly deceiving. A love story? Perhaps. But the bitterness and heart-breaking loneliness that plague the pages of this novel breed an unexpectedly Read More