Issue #262

• Writing in the here and now.>>Atavists.

• A question of neutrality in language. >>Universality.

• Keeping faith in the project. >>Audition.

• On the bench. >>Seascraper.

• Instant empathy. >>Empathy.

• Headshots. >>Endling.

• Wildly informative and generous. >>Slowing the Sun.

• Self-termination is most likely. >>Goliath’s Curse.

• The debt to David Graeber. >>Books by David Graeber.

• Bread. >>This Compulsion in Us.

• Unpacking science. >>The Covid Response. >>Read an extract.

• Biography. >>Rowing her own waka.

• Raisins. >>Good Days.

• One little corner for the children.

• Chronic illness and creative recuperation.

• Our film recommendation this week: Cottontail.

• Nighthawks at the library.

Issue #261

• More ways of understanding. >>Diary of an Ending.

• The punk rock translator. >>Fair.

• Playing fair. >>Fair.

• Where words dissolve. >>Exophony.

• Chaos seeps into order. >>Endling.

• A psychological umbilical cord. >>Selfish Girls.

• The last dreams. >>I Found Myself…

• Salt statues. >>A Sunny Place for Shady People.

• Poetry after Gaza.

• The sun is slowly disappearing. >>Sunbirth.

• Nature is not going to cure you. >>The Salt Path.

• Cormac McCarthy’s personal library.

• Metamodernism, anyone?

• The struggle for narrative.

• Big tech in the classroom.

• Representation is democracy.

• Our film recommendation this week: The Other Side of Hope.

• Some Aotearoa fiction writers and their bands.

Issue #260

• Dust words, dust worlds. >>Dust.

• The origin of language. >>Parade.

• Where they write. >>The 2025 Booker long list.

• Not always calm on the inside. >>When the Museum Is Closed.

• All good novels make you think about what a novel can do. >>One Boat.

• Representation. >>Your copies.

• The more you do, the more difficult it gets. >>Minor Detail.

• The swamp disgorges its secrets. >>Kataraina.

• A friction between the line and the sentence. >>I Do Know Some Things.

• Dropped onto an alien planet. >>Flashlight.

• How women listen. >>Hark.

• Stacks. >>Wrong Norma.

• The joys of Moominscrolling. >>Visit the Moomins.

• Ellen Jones recommends. >>Outrage.

• Forever changed. >>Two Serious Ladies.

• A sublimely inaccurate portrait.

• Getting literature out there.

• Bach annotated by Gould. >>1981.

• Backtracking on a promise. >>Submit!

• Our film recommendation this week: It Must Be Heaven.

• A Dickensian alphabet.

Issue #259

• Rehearsal /41. >>Diary of an Ending.

• Radical ways. >>Precarious Lease.

• Early contact. >>The Welcome of Strangers.

• A legacy to match. >>William Blake and the Sea Monsters of Love.

• The experience of Palestine in narration. >>Minor Detail.

• Do it badly if you must. >>The Safekeep.

• Killing animals. >>Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead.

• Family farm. >>Wifedom.

• Why do we make art? >>What Art Does.

• Exploring who we are. >>Salutation Road.

• Part of me will remain. >>Sympathy Tower Tokyo.

• Death at the zoo. >>Animal Stories.

• Always inadequate. >>Books by Vivian Gornick.

• What Becky is reading. >>Books by Becky Manawatu.

• A good poet. >>Books by Alice Oswald.

• A poetry map of Skye.

• The widening gyre.

• How dreams change under authoritarianism.

• Erasure notebooks.

• An updated Kiwi Christmas classic.

• A digital marae.

• The smear of non-being.

• Take away our language and we will forget who we are. >>Decolonising Language, And other revolutionary ideas.

• Adam Shatz’s Berlin diary. >>The Rebel’s Clinic.

• Is it wrong to anthropomorphise animals? >>Books by Megan Dunn.

• Shyness.

• The game of kings.

• Operation Frog (1984).

• The last date in Gaza.

• If only we had known before trying this in ‘real’ life!

• Our film recommendation this week: Killer of Sheep.

• A new educational chart.

Issue #258

• Shaken through by the wind. >>Girlbeast.

• Memory trying to touch the bottom of the deep lake. >>Clay Eaters. >>The Anatomy of Sand. >>In the Cracks of Light.

• Like no recipe book you’ve ever read. >>The Evin Prison Bakers’ Club.

• Made with resourcefulness, memory, and love. >>Boustany.

• Bread. >>This Compulsion In Us.

• A T-shirt in K-mart. >>Slowing the Sun.

• Cultural exchange. >>Proto.

• Fiction helps us get closer to the truth. >>Small Boat.

• 100 years don’t weight me down. >>Lexicon of Affinities.

• Who are your rivers? >>Is a River Alive?

• Baseline Communism. >>The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World.

• What does a translator do?

• Don’t we all want to be happy? >>Erik Satie Three Piece Suite.

• Another form of imperialism. >>Perfection.

• Ngā whetū.

• Lost in tragedy.

• Transformation, anyone? >>Selected Stories.

• Sharpen your pencils.

• Unforbidden.

• Why generative A.I. won’t disrupt books.

• On resistance.

• Hoping for a(nother) miracle.

• Who is behind the new curricula?

• Represented and reconnected. >>The Whale Rider (deluxe edition).

• “Safety”.

• Assaulting democracy.

• A line that cuts to the heart. >>This House of Grief.

• Immediate and complete.

• Consequences.

• Our film recommendation this week: Mouthpiece.

• One for Shane Jones.

Issue #257

• Intelligence is beautiful. >>Invisible Intelligence.

• On the magic of translation. >>Fair.

• Our food, our heritage, our culture. >>Boustany.

• Unexplored depths. >>Ultramarine

• Unspoiled. >>Human/Nature.

• A dark legacy. >>Children of Radium.

• Misogyny in the Metaverse. >> The New Age of Sexism.

• Demanding pleasures.

• Fake nature. >>Hum.

• A new place and a new politics. >>Audition.

• Blown away. >>Collected Works.

• The human condition. >>Annie Bot.

• Difficult mothers. >>Selfish Girls.

• 1037 babies. >>The Origins of You.

• Oppression, Capitalism and control. >>The Unworthy.

• PANZ Book Design Awards 2025 finalists.

• Rat universes.

• Sprayed edges.

• The Living Ancestor.

• The Ballpoint Pens. [We hope the link works this time!]

• On the ark.

• What’s happening to reading?

• Speaking reassurance to power. >>Books by Pankaj Mishra.

• A book stall in the rubble.

• Writers write with urgency.

• “I am not a melodramatic person.”

• Where life is seized.

• Language alienates us from the self.

• Our film recommendation this week: I’m Still Here.

• If Charlie Brown were a Socialist. >>Mafalda.

Issue #256

• Morbid symptoms. >>Theory & Practice.

• Opaque sap. >>Ultramarine.

• The living, the dead, and sailors. >>Ultramarine

• Inside a character. >>Delirious.

• Write less; write stronger. >>Call Me Ishmaelle.

• Verbs explode a constricted throat. >>The Anatomy of Sand.

• A second heart. >>Slender Volumes.

• Oppression, capitalism, control. >>The Unworthy.

• No protection. >>Books by Raja Shehadeh.

• Selective Luddism. >>Powsels and Thrums.

• An efficient man. >>38 Londres Street.

• The other girl. >>Granta 172. >>Books by Annie Ernaux.

• Out of time. >>Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming.

• Three giants. >>Audition.

• The definitive ranking of reading technologies.

• An east wind behind it.

• On writing a novel without knowing or planning anything. >>Absence.

• Fabulism, paranoia and allegory. >>Books by Dino Buzzati.

• The grammar of a god-ocean.

• Dyed-in-the-wool Modernism.

• In from the margins.

• Left turns.

• The black paintings.

• The Ballpoint Pens.

• This bothers you more than it should.

• Natsume Sōseki’s study.

• Pareo ergo sum.

• Our film recommendation this week: Small Things Like These. >>Read the book!

• The perfect job.

Issue #255

• Simultaneously becoming and unbecoming. >>To Rest Our Minds and Bodies.

• A peculiar organ. >>To Rest Our Minds and Bodies.

• Endless repeats. >>On the Calculation of Volume.

• Not like other mothers. >>Elaine.

• Danger and dialogue. >>Mountainish.

• The many rooms within. >>The Book of Records.

• Deficit language. >>Slowing the Sun.

• What comes next. >>The Covid Response.

• The redemptive power of art. >>The Seers.

• An immersive take. >>The Seers.

• Pearls and whale poo. >>The Chthonic Cycle.

• Survived.

• Building momentum. >>Books from Prototype.

• Peering into the eyes of the past. >>Mythica.

• Schopenhauer vs. Nietzsche. >>On the Suffering of the World. >>The Gay Science.

• Details vs. message. >>The Salt Path.

• Accuracy vs nuance.

• Why your name matters. >>The Names.

• Crackling. >>The Names.

• Derrida’s debts.

• Doctors Under Attack.

• The shaking web.

• Joy and inspiration.

• Cowthink.

• Free of human logic. >>A Book of Surrealist Games.

• Our film recommendation this week: The Haka Party Incident.

• This is the life!

Issue #254

• No redeeming qualities. >>Pretty Ugly. >>Talking Books.

• Exploded essays. >>The Vast Extent.

• Oppositional beauty. >>Ugliness.

• The human art of translation. >>Fair. >>Speaking in tongues.

• Transmission. >>Fair. >>(Transmission.) (>>Mind Jail (featuring Jen Calleja))

• Outer and inner space. >>The Anatomy of Sand.

• Prose stripped to the bone and the bone itself boiled white. >>The Unnamable.

• Less matters more. >>Vertigo.

• The characters yearn for connection. >>The Accidentals.

• Something is surviving. >>The Empusium.

• Olga Tokarczuk’s divine cosmos. >>Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead.

• The bridge builder.

• Posterity.

• After the Haiku Period. >>Books by Joy Williams.

• The radical notion of the third act. >>Marina Abramović Turned Herself into Art and Wasn’t Sorry.

• How to destroy 500,000 books.

• A warning for us here, even.

• Film has its own language and the novelist has her own language. >>Hot Milk. >>Hot Milk.

• A forced literary migration.

• Drying out.

• What’s wrong with me?

• Our film recommendation this week: Fremont.

• An author’s visit to the lost property office.

Issue #253

• By number and title. >>Concerning the Future of Souls.

• Making meaning and being made by it. >>Gliff.

• Making it make sense. >>Slowing the Sun.

• The river was writing me. >>Is a River Alive?

• Coming to his senses. >>Is a River Alive?

• An unfortunately brief encounter. >>Delirious.

• A metaphorical middle finger. >>Hunchback.

• Connective tissues. >>This Compulsion in Us.

• In the mirror of a page. >>This Compulsion in Us.

• SUBMIT!

• A writer’s attempt to describe chronic pain. >>Pathemata.

• Heartbreaking. >>The Safekeep.

• Complexity to clarity. >>The Covid Response.

• Not to grieve.

• The first review. >>A Different Kind of Power.

• Empathy is a kind of strength. >>A Different Kind of Power.

• Soft, grassy, sweet-smelling. >>Japan, An autobiography.

• She is and she does. >>Groundwork.

• How Jane Austen pulled it off. >>Emma.

• Emerald green.

• A sickening plan.

• A hybrid brain.

• Half the volume.

• The marketing is still crap.

• Our film recommendation this week: All We Imagine as Light.

• Frederica Sala.

Issue #252

• Using the world. >>On the Calculation of Volume.

• Writing without fear. >>The Seers.

• Dancing on the page. >>The Seers.

• Blood, sweat, tears, and body shaming. >>Cry When the Baby Cries.

• Writing is not therapy. >>Sad Tiger.

• Hands fluent with silence. >>Slowing the Sun.

• In pursuit of a frictionless life. >>Perfection.

• “Authenticity.” >>Perfection.

• There once was a woman who. >>Natalja’s Stories.

• Soothing, rinsing, complex. >>Kataraina.

• A challenging and peculiar life. >>This Compulsion in Us.

• Prismatic Gilgamesh. >>Sophus Helle’s translation.

• Mapping the geographies of memories. >>Clay Eaters.

• On walking and looking as a way of life. >>Still Life with Remorse. >>Women Holding Things.

• Kaleidoscopic. >>Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors.

• Out of the coma. >>The Abyss.

• Two weapons that the powerful dread. >>Theory & Practice.

• The reader thinks it isn’t a novel. >>Theory & Practice.

• The tender narrator. >>Books by Olga Tokarczuk.

• Is this fascism? >>Disaster Nationalism.

• Thinking place.

• Information to inform your submission on the Regulatory Standards Bill.

• Creative constraints.

• Smashing the teapots.

• A question of free will.

• Our film recommendation this week: Bleak Moments.

• The splash of a drop.

Issue #251

• Weighing up the contenders. >>Your pick.

• Mother Morning, Mother Afternoon, and Mother Night. >>The Book of Guilt.

• Why 1979, specifically? >>The Book of Guilt.

• Disrupting stereotypes. >>Hine Toa.

• Squinting at mountains. >>Mountainish.

• Flooded roads, falling rocks. >>Mountainish.

• Notes on danger and dialogue. >>Mountainish.

• How should we respond to what has been lost? >>Slowing the Sun.

• A struggle or a gift? >>Slowing the Sun.

• The morning after. >>Delirious. >>The other winners.

• The lessons we’re still to learn. >>The Covid Response.

• i am elsewhere. >>rock flight.

• In search of a home. >>All recommended by us!

• Man flicking free of feet.

• Anything could happen. >>Boodle Boodle Boodle.

• Why we still need novels. >>There Are Rivers in the Sky.

• My sadness is not a burden. >>Things in Nature Merely Grow.

• Exquisite, craggy detail. >>Clear.

• The rooms of fiction.

• Drafting Mrs Dalloway. >>Mrs Dalloway.

• 100 Mrs Dalloways.

• Against algorithms.

• Who’s eating publishers’ lunch?

• Does the unconscious exist?

• It cannot be denied.

• Words themselves are under threat.

• Huia. >>Wow.

• How to write a book.

• The world’s shortest maths article.

• Ivor Cutler interviews Ivor Cutler.

• Show your face.

• Body on the edge of crisis.

• Our film recommendation this week: Head South.

• How to focus on writing your book.

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