Issue #281

• At the round table. >>Read the books.

• Stupefying and overwhelming. >>Transcription.

• The philosophical and the intimate. >>Transcription.

• The duck-rabbit of fiction. >>Transcription.

• A forest of tripwires. >>The Valley.

• A can of worms. >>Angst.

• A love letter to language. >>Light and Thread.

• They are the last. >>Why Look at Animals?

• When the present is haunted by the past. >>Minor Detail.

• Windows. >>Hell of Solitude.

• Literary beef. >>Hell of Solitude.

• Hell of solitude. >>Hell of Solitude.

• The stories of others. >>Absence.

• There’s no such thing as boredom, only noticing. >>Brawler.

• Sergei N.’s brief gestalt. >>Happiness.

• Read in a certain way. >>Happiness.

• Three intense calamities. >>Night, Ma.

• A year of family crises. >>Night, Ma.

• Translations in an emergency. >>Into the Weeds.

• Not always an easy thing to do. >>What to Wear.

• The architecture of a lie. >>London Falling.

• On the banks of the River Thames. >>London Falling.

• The language of silence.

• The reality of the present. >>Books by Krasznahorkai.

• If a Bridgerton and a Jane Austen character met. >>The Encyclopedia of Ugly Fashion.

• Writ large.

• Means and ends.

• What does it mean to be a UNESCO City of Literature?

• Our film recommendation this wek: All I Had Was Nothingness.

• It isn’t hoarding.

• See you later, alligator.

Issue #280

• Technologies of illusion. >>The Shadow of the Object.

• Resist assuming. >>The Palm House.

• Don’t mind me in my coffin. >>The Palm House.

• It is necessary to speak from the uncomfortable place of subjectivity. >>Lithium.

• Levitt x Denis. >>Lithium.

• Why the novel matters. >>My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein.

• Morality as a zero sum game. >>The Quantity Theory of Morality.

• Anagnorisis. >>Recognising the Stranger.

• How should we look at the period formerly known as the Renaissance? >>Inventing the Renaissance.

• The cult of Solvej Balle. >>On the Calculation of Volume.

• A genius in any language. >>Books by Yoko Tawada.

• Enemy language. >>I Don’t Care.

• Something more subtle. >>Hell of Solitude.

• What do we have when we do not have a story? >>Hell of Solitude.

• No other choice. >>The Art of Asking Your Boss for a Raise.

• Only nine days. >>Death of an Ordinary Man.

• Both epic and intimate. >>Son of Nobody.

• Processed and packaged. >>Snack.

• An antidote to loneliness. >>Nation of Strangers.

• In twenty years most of the world could be racist dictatorships. >>Chain of Ideas.

• A renovation of Nazi ideas. >>Chain of Ideas.

• Hotel/hostel/hospital. >>Hotel Exile.

• Ten of the best. >>In the Dreamlife You Need a Rubber Soul.

• Prone to be productive.

• More like us.

• Death and translation.

• The impossible patient.

• The man behind the curtain.

• The libraries that weren’t supposed to exist.

• Our film recommendation this week: High and Low.

• How to write a statement condemning violence without saying anything.

Issue #279

• The International Booker shortlist films. >>The International Booker shortlist books.

• Tongue. >>My Dreadful Body.

• Silence speaks. >>My Dreadful Body.

• Madness and philosophy. >>On the Greenwich Line.

• A passage and a slideshow. >>On the Greenwich Line.

• Fifty shades of whiteness. >>On the Greenwich Line.

• Protect that pain. >>Discipline.

• Writing toward the void. >>Discipline.

• ”I want to lie.” >>Discipline.

• Like a free-flowing river. >>We Are Green and Trembling.

• Dissecting the rot. >>The Rot.

• Poetry, rage, and the power of not surrendering. >>The Rot.

• Getting evil freely. >>Ghost Driver.

• Calamities and care. >>Night, Ma.

• The closely noticed husband. >>Night, Ma.

• A one-sentence review. >>The Art of Asking Your Boss for a Raise.

• Questioning the quotidian. >>The Art of Asking Your Boss for a Raise.

• The last of many libraries. >>Books, A Manifesto.

• Theories of attraction. >>Black Bag.

• A commercial chiller unit. >>Black Bag.

• Endless hype queues. >>All Consuming.

• Books and paper. >>I Found Myself…

• All they will find is sand. >>Hollow Land.

• What the garden remembers. >>Three Stories of Forgetting.

• Womanhood, identity, and fairy tales. >>Seasons of Glass and Iron.

• There is no art that is separate from politics. >>Seasons of Glass and Iron.

• The no-self minority. >>The Man Without Qualities.

• Where’s the plan?

• Prisoners into poets.

• Deep grief, self-belief, and chocolate cake.

• Our film recommendation this week: Les Créatures.

• The librarians who take children.

Issue #278

• Queering the boundaries. >>Hiding Places.

• Leakiness and fluidity. >>Hiding Places.

• Bleeding in the dishes. >>On the Calculation of Volume IV.

• Demanding pleasures. >>Into the Weeds.

• Little and large. >>Into the Weeds.

• Myths of meaning. >>The Way to Colonos.

• Never letting up. >>Night, Ma.

• The film that laid an egg. >>Night, Ma.

• A new alphabet, a new vocabulary. >>Things in Nature Merely Grow.

• The winds blow their smoke. >>Ruins, Child.

• The name has stuck. >>Ruins, Child.

• Symptoms were mistaken for cause. >>Leaves Fall Off to Create Drama.

• Frowning camera. >>The Autobiography of a Marguerite.

• Pure genius. >>I Don’t Care.

• Every wrong turn. >>Ghost Driver.

• A tapestry of humiliation. >>Ghost Driver.

• Anything could happen. >>In the Dreamlife You Need a Rubber Soul.

• Writing toward the void. >>Discipline.

• A free, supple life. >>The Daffodil Days.

• ”I wrote The Rot.” >>The Rot.

• Identity and exile. >>Good Girl.

• Not the way it was planned. >>Small Comfort.

• From Peepo! to Middlemarch. >>The Haunted Wood.

• Sisterhood and survival. >>Sisters in Yellow.

• The horrors persist. >>A Woman’s Work.

• The illusion of the first person.

• Empty words.

• Perform!

• Our film recommendation this week: I Like Killing Flies. >>Arbitrary Stupid Goal.

• 434 films.

Issue #277

• How stories work. >>Glyph.

• Exhilarating/excoriating. >>Glyph.

• A man in flux. >>Helen of Nowhere.

• The way of salt and sin. >>Figures Crossing the Field Towards the Group.

• There is no literary problem that can’t be solved through walking. >>they.

• Exiled to the op shop. >>Kupe and the Great Octopus of Muturangi.

• The germ and the translation. >>We Are Green and Trembling.

• The importance of representation. >>We Are Green and Trembling.

• A tender animal. >>We Are Green and Trembling.

• After the Haiku period. >>The Pelican Child.

• Uncanny the singing that comes from certain husks. >>The Pelican Child.

• What about the piglet? >>On Earth As It Is Beneath.

• Intolerable atrocities, abominations, brutalities. >>The Duke.

• On Angst. >>Angst.

• Very close, very far. >>Angst.

• Little by little, he makes out the forms of things. >>Wilderness of Mirrors.

• The life he lost. >>Who Will Tell My Story?

• Inside Modi’s India. >>Granta 173.

• Nature and non-linear love. >>Pulse.

• Writing in your head. >>Pulse.

• Driving on. >>The Illogic of Kassel.

• Today we just say Germany. >>Dark Matter.

• Rage as a tool for compassion. >>Vigil.

• A very interesting person’s exact idea of a very good time. >>Nonesuch.

• Our film recommendation this week: The Man With the Movie Camera.

• Embracing the short novel.

Issue #276

• A deep field of focus. >>Animal Stories.

• Beautiful minimalism. >>they.

• Hating the past tense. >>they.

• A fable about totalitarianism written in brain-fluid. >>Schattenfroh.

• Devil and invention. >>Schattenfroh.

• Radical optimism. >>Helm.

• Between compassion and hatred. >>Brawler.

• A growing fondness for confrontation. >>Cannon.

• The subtlety of the birds. >>Cannon.

• Threads of empire. >>Patchwork.

• The fate of the artist under totalitarianism. >>The Director.

• Complicity. >>The Director.

• Which of our thoughts are interesting? >>Any Person Is the Only Self.

• An environment for thinking. >>Any Person Is the Only Self.

• The brilliant and necessary southern aunt of New Zealand Letters. >>A Writer’s Life. >>This Moment, Every Moment.

• The Ockhams poetry sampler. >>Get your copies.

• Writing amid catastrophe.

• From Gaza to Iran.

• Five films for freedom.

• Our film recommendation this week: Sentimental Value.

• Brain rot or Finnegans Wake?

Issue #275

• Thinking around. >> My Bourgeois Apocalypse.

• Ego and contentment. >>Helen of Nowhere.

• Continually evolving truths. >>Helen of Nowhere.

• The presence of an orphan. >>Fourteen Ways of Looking.

• Exhausting a constituted fragment of the world. >>Fourteen Ways of Looking.

• Death at the zoo. >>Animal Stories.

• Riding the bed. >>Ruins, Child.

• Grasping for the next detail. >>Ruins, Child.

• Taut yet teeming. >>Brawler.

• You just do language. >>Brawler.

• What is buried in what is written? >> Aug 9 — Fog.

• “XXXXXX XXXXXXX XXXXXXXX?”  >>Taiwan Travelogue.

• Self-surveillance in the internet age. >>Exposure.

• Culpability. >>Party Boy.

• How can you really tell the truth about this moment? >>Vigil.

• Lords of the world. >>Lives of the Caesars.

• No turning back. >>She Who Remains.

• Of dogs and horses. >>All the Lights.

• A place of life and stories. >>Somebody Is walking On Your Grave.

• Every word is doing something. >>A Room Above a Shop.

• Inside voice. >>A World Appears.

• A surprising offer. >>The Last Wolf. >>Other books by Krasznahorkai.

• Interviewed by a brick. >>Books by Sebald.

• What is Claude?

• Striking fear.

• Our film recommendation this week: The Castle. >>Read the book.

• The haters.

Issue #274

• You were there. >>Leather & Chains.

• Gliff in the spruce forest. >>Gliff. >>So in the Spruce Forest.

• The wind was like a childhood friend. >>Helm.

• Thwarted by concealment. >>Chasing Homer.

• War, trauma, and politics. >>Green Ink.

• A firebrand’s last day. >>Green Ink.

• Why these books. >>Order your copies.

• Writing like a painter paints. >>Pure Colour.

• A gun or a basket of food? >>Empathy.

• The grief of using a daughter. >>The Year After Kahlia.

• Occult work and maternal labour. >>My Work.

• Laughing/thinking. >>James.

• Beyond Kataraina. >>Auē. >>Kataraina.

• Mental places. >>Books by Gerald Murnane.

• The language of the unconscious.

• Get it right. >>Books on Te Tiriti.

• Whose story?

• Consciousness everywhere all at once. >>A Spinoza Reader.

• Rethinking the nature of truth.

• Watch: The Thing with Feathers. >>Read: Grief Is the Thing with Feathers.

• Michel Foucault from A to Z.

Issue #273

• The fingerprint and the roller coaster. >>Some Helpful Models of Grief.

• A milieu at odds with itself. >>Sister Europe.

• Connecting the dots. >>Sister Europe.

• Holding the skin girdle. >>The Employees. >>The Wax Child.

• Paragraphs as rooms. >>I Do Know Some Things.

• On Richard Siken. >>I Do Know Some Things.

• Burning with purpose. >>Money to Burn. >>The Devil Book.

• Rip up all the rules. >>A Long Game.

• Edith Holler in the card theatre. >>Edith Holler. >>Download, print, and make the card theatre.

• The art of unsettling. >>Coming. Apart.

• Obsessive surveillance. >>Coming. Apart.

• Transparency and trust. >>How to Rebuild Trust in Journalism.

• The stories we tell become the world we inhabit. >>Between Two Rivers.

• How do you want to spend your free time? >>In Defence of Leisure.

• Craft, critics, and the blurb economy. >>Trip.

• Forced to cross the sea. >>Love Forms.

• Some books on Te Tiriti o Waitangi.

• Education and hope. >>Understanding Te Tiriti. >>Understanding Hauora.

• “Serious” literature. >>Books by Krasznahorkai.

• Do you need a writer’s room?

• The Perec case. >>Place your order now.

• Thomas Mann and the temptations of fascism.

• How A.I. changes the way we think and speak.

• What’s the word for… forgetting words?

• Lowering the risk.

• A new way of creating.

• The best songs inspired by literature — ranked!

Issue #272

• Without form, and void. >>Delirious New Lynn.

• Wiped clean. >>I Do Know Some Things.

• The most fundamental poetic device. >>I Do Know Some Things.

• Inside out. >>The Endless Week.

• Death Panel. >>Health Communism.

• Cutting wood in New York. >>Happiness and Love.

• In the aftermath of the impossible. >>The Effingers.

• Rowdy and confounding. >>Gertrude Stein: An afterlife. >>Spent Light.

• The far side of disaster. >>To the Lighthouse.

• Made for strength. >>The Wax Child. >>I Gave You Eyes and You Looked Toward Darkness.

• Outrage. >>Vulture.

• The colonial project. >>Garrison World.

• A new spotlight. >>Books from Charco Press.

• Watching TV. >>Yell, Sam, If You Still Can.

• All very well. >>Grave of the Fireflies.

• Tolerable disorder.

• Is hate politically useful? >>Hate.

• A sword is mightier than the pen. >>Book of Lives.

• A loveless childhood. >>Leaving Home.

• Ten writing prompts. >>three six five.

• The job. >>Those Passions.

• Borges and ‘Borges’. >>Borges.

• It will fail. >>Enshittification.

• An amphibious thing. >>Radical Wordsworth.

• What to give on a friendaversary.

• Another country.

• In the bombed-out ruins.

• Louise Bourgeois’s suitcase. >>Now, Now, Louison.

• The kingdom in his head. >>Titus Alone.

• Unbroken visions.

• It’s already happening.

• The covers.

• Dostoevsky’s influence on modern Japan.

• A customer complaint.

• My comments are in the Google.doc linked in the Dropbox I sent in the Slack.

Issue #271

• Literature as technology. >>Good and Evil and Other Stories.

• Fear, healing, and terrifyingly permeable boundaries. >>Good and Evil and Other Stories.

• Merging autofiction with speculative fiction. >>State of Paradise.

• Feral cats. >>State of Paradise.

• Literary cubist. >>An Afterlife.

• Gertrude Stein’s love language. >>An Afterlife.

• Supernatural talent. >>Kings of this World.

• Recapturing a golden age. >>The Effingers.

• Thirty years to write a novel about one day. >>On the Calculation of Volume.

• Memory and repetition. >>On the Calculation of Volume.

• How to make a time loop endlessly interesting. >>On the Calculation of Volume.

• I have not always gone by this name. >>Call Me Ishmaelle.

• Balancing the public and the private. >>The Catch.

• Straight from the cemetery. >>The Cemetery of Untold Stories.

• I am made entirely of wood. >>The Expansion Project.

• Resisting cliche through prose. >>Telenovela.

• What our relationship with cats reveals about ourselves. >>Cat.

• Why your unread books define you.

• Studies of unmeaning. >>Shadow Ticket.

• Unmapped storylands. >>There Are Rivers in the Sky.

• Japanese culture through rare books.

• Wittgenstein vs. Wittgenstein. >>Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. >>Philosophical Investigations.

• Power, not theory. >>Books by Vivek Chibber.

• Entering the public domain.

• The man behind the curtain. >>Don Quixote.

• A.I. is coming for culture.

• Who were the Daughters of Bilitis?

• Everything was against Beatriz Bernal.

• Our film recommendation this week: Cria Cuevrvos.

• Blue-sky thinking.

Issue #270

• They disappeared when the wall came down. >>Things That Disappear.

• Junk. >>Things That Disappear.

• Death, divorce, loss. >>The Heart-Shaped Tin.

• Witch trials and wax narrators. >>The Wax Child.

• Facing the blank page. >>The Wax Child.

• Odd things happened. >>Electric Spark.

• World-beating buster-upper. >>Electric Spark.

• An investigation into the nature of fiction and reality. >>A fictional inquiry.

• Using ChatGPT to write the novel. >>Sympathy Tower Tokyo.

• Charlatan or genius? >>Gertrude Stein: An afterlife.

• X. >>In Defence of Leisure.

• In my power to make it different. >>In Defence of Leisure.

• Writing about all of it. >>The Four Spent the Day Together.

• Writing Ugly. >>Dreaming of Dead People.

• The penultimate chapter. >>Dreaming of Dead People.

• Unlearning. >>Feeding Ghosts.

• Sheer gentleness. >>Fatherhood.

• Boots on the ground. >>Garrison World.

• Should a novel avoid the processes of its own composition? >>Lorem Ipsum.

• Technology, attention, and the extremely long paragraph.

• The space between reality and fantasy. >>The Accidentals.

• She is the situation. >>Big Kiss, Bye-Bye.

• Exploring the archive. >>Lanark.

• We teach life, sir. >>Resisting Erasure.

• Salvage and reconstruction.

• Near-sightedness.

• Thirteen Indian languages.

• The post-colonial experience.

• Become a better reader.

• A very big fight over a very small language.

• Our film recommendation this week: Hot Milk. >>Read the book!

• Pinter to Stoppard.