‘Dublin,Ireland. 1985. A war is raging between The Government, RTE [the Irish state broadcaster] and the 28 illegal Pirate radio stations, who have taken control of the Nation’s airwaves and the advertising revenue that goes with it’- so reads the description on the cover of Helen Seymour’s debut novel, Beautiful Noise– a story about an […]
How do British schoolgirl classics like the Chalet School and Mallory Towers translate to todays bestsellers like Twighlight and The Hunger Games? Amy Ellis-Thomas compares the stock situations and rhetoric of the 1950s boarding schools to today’s equally codified young adult literature.
“Two years after I killed Blyth I murdered my young brother Paul, for quite different and more fundamental reasons than I’d disposed of Blyth, and then a year after that I did for my cousin Esmerelda, more or less on a whim. That’s my score to date. Three. I haven’t killed anybody for years, and […]
The Confidence of Youth My friendship with McGiolla was in some ways the story of my college career. I met him towards the end of my first Michaelmas term, on a cold night in November 1990. At that stage, we were both heavily involved in the debating society – the debsoc – but had yet […]
Have you had the suspicion that simple narratives about subprime mortgages, last minute bail-outs, and sweaty-palmed bankers fail to adequately explain what has happened to the global economy since 2008? If so, then I can heartily recommend you pick up a copy of Yanis Varoufakis‘s The Global Minotaur – America, Europe and the Future of […]
Meike Ziervogel is a writer and journalist living in London. She grew up in northern Germany and came to London to study Arabic language and literature. In 2008 she founded Peirene Press, an independent publishing industry dedicated to producing contemporary European novellas in English translation1. In 2012 she was voted as one of the top […]
Kate’s story was the best thing that I had read. Not just the best thing anyone had sent to our magazine but the best thing that I had read, ever. All I could do was accept that I loved this story more than anything else. There was nothing I already had that I cared about […]
It is not only by dint of lying to others, but also of lying to ourselves, that we cease to notice that we are lying. – Marcel Proust In the summer of 2011, I was sitting in a packed church. The soon-to-be married couple were exchanging vows. The groom recited the following quote: Love one another, but […]
Beyond (2): Crisis Cell Prazma spins on her swivel chair and scissors her legs into the webcam. ‘Loubou tahn, Josh, baby. Are you getting this?’ ‘This is Prazma,’ Claire shouts into the laptop. ‘A tall, authoritative woman.’ ‘Claire once tagged me in a Facebook photo,’ Prazma says, ‘as ‘Prazma’ and then ‘Prazma’s tits’.’ ‘She has […]
