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.

Issue #269

• We are all weirdos. >>TonyInterruptor.

• Your brain syringed through your ear. >>TonyInterruptor.

• To go with the flow, or not. >>We Live Here Now.

• “I still dream about those places.” >>We Live Here Now.

• Confessional anti-confessionalism. >>Flower.

• Rejecting motherhood. >>Death of an Ordinary Man.

• Catching Up. >>Homework.

• Giving Up. >>Homework.

• Dark mysteries and glittery illusions. >>The Silver Book.

• Fictionalising a murder. >>The Silver Book.

• Gleeful Scorn. >>Loren Ipsum.

• Postcards from Virginia Woolf.

• Thwarted transcendence. >>The Doloriad.

• Not seeing the shadow. >>A Woman’s Eye, Her Art.

• Short-changed. >>The Lost Girls of Autism.

• Breaking point.

• The instability of self-portrait. >>Alphabetical Diaries.

• The madness of reality. >>And the books.

• Whistle while you work.

• Grief and healing. >>A Counter of Moons.

• Pretend and actual. >> Fair Play.

• How dreams change under authoritarianism.

• A report on alternative chess.

• Does poetry exist, or not.

• The obscure object of language.

• The illegal revenge pool.

• Only largely positive.

Issue #268

• Animal obsessions. >>Autobiography of Death.

• What the picture knows. >>Mr Outside.

• Are you comfortable? >>Mr Outside.

• A kaleidoscopic study of transience. >>Things That Disappear.

• Keeping time. >>Things That Disappear.

• A strange miracle. >>Vaim.

• Memory, identity, synchronicity. >>Any Person Is the Only Self.

• A life reimagined. >>Indignity.

• The righteous community. >>Homeland.

• Fitting everything in. >>Hiding Places.

• Walking on two legs. >>The Deserters.

• The time of return. >>The Deserters.

• Love, loss, and HIV. >>Nova Scotia House.

• New pastoralism? >>Emergency.

• Precarity. >>Dwelling.

• Reading in the dark.

• What happens when the wind turns deadly. >>The Breath of the Gods.

• The structural stupidity of bureaucracy. >>Bullshit Jobs.

• Pibroch at Braemar. >> The Bagpipes: A cultural history.

• Pessimistic humanism. >>The Magic Mountain.

• Barbara Pym, author …and stalker. >>A Very Private Eye. >>The Adventures of Miss Barbara Pym.

• Connecting the dots.

• Inside the Guerilla Girls.

• A night in the annex.

• Rise to the microchallenge.

• What does it mean to be human?

• Kiwi Christmas Books. >>Donate here.

• Visit the Sevan Writers’ House.

• The nine circles of Hell.

Issue #267

• Too sick, too silly, too gross. >>Sea, Poison.

• Art rats in New York City. >>Bread of Angels.

• Good old Landfall gets older. >>Landfall Tauraka 250.

• Inevitable distraction. >>Fair.

• Trembling Earth. >>So in the Spruce Forest.

• Beyond the bounds of fiction. >>The Möbius Book.

• Infinite regress. >>The Möbius Book.

• Avian investigation. >>Omnibird.

• Chosen. >>The Welcome of Strangers.

• Towards an impossible novel. >>Chapter on Love.

• The end of the middle ground. >>The Meeting Place.

• Fiction as an exercise in sabotage. >>Call Me Ishmaelle.

• The afterlives of Moby-Dick. >>Call Me Ishmaelle.

• A guide to the intimacy of language and translation. >>Misinterpretation.

• Unpacking poverty. >>Hardship and Hope.

• Running from the truth. >>Will There Ever Be Another You.

• Lights in the sky. >>Flashlight.

• Lyra’s last story. >>The Rose Field.

• Plant travel. >>Case Studies.

• Soul jump. >>Orlanda.

• Stories from the graveyard shift. >>The Midnight Timetable.

• Horror, humour, and politics. >>The Midnight Timetable.

• From under the houses. >>Honeyeater.

• The Vase.

• Love in an imploding world. >>Vera, or Faith.

• Putting in the commas.

• The love affair continues.

• Our film recommendation this week: This Life of Mine.

• Foucault #1.

• Foucault #2.

Issue #266

• The Booker shortlist films! >>What the judges think.

• Desire and possession. >>Zombie Proust.

• Unhiding. >>Hiding Places.

• Motherhood vs. creativity. >>Hiding Places.

• To Chris, with love. >>Not Given Lightly.

• Breaking rules. >>Finding out more.

• Europe’s perilous reality. >>A dark thread.

• I don’t need anything from here.

• Different tchipangă. >>Ten Nosey Weka.

• A huge shift. >>Edges of Empire.

• The mystery of Medea. >>No Friend to this House.

• Literature is a form of resistance. >>Indignity. >>The Are Rivers in the Sky.

• All food is fusion. >>FUSÃO.

• She disappeared for twenty years. >>Sonia & Sunny.

• How to keep a diary. >>Diary of an Ending.

• What could be lost? >>Sight Lines.

• What do the best-designed books look like? >>Sight Lines.

• Similarities. >>Matapēhi.

• The pinch of pages. >>Slowing the Sun.

• Land, people, pen.

• Nuanced. >>Pastoral Care.

• Two tankas. >>Books by Richard von Sturmer.

• Prototypes. >>A choice of prototype.

• The germ and the text. >>Perfection.

• Democracy descends. >>38 Londres Street.

• They didn’t even read the book.

• Not reading ahead.

• The smallest units of language. >>Books by Lydia Davis.

• The anatomy of a hair. >>Bezoar.

• Four easy steps. >>Start with a Teapot.

• To save a library.

• Who can write a novel today?

• Dread as excitement.

• Speed reading is bullshit.

• Our film recommendation this week: Universal Language.

• Collective nouns for librarians.