Latest Features
Reasons Not to Bathe
Things got sticky this week, Stephen told her, when the man he called the Russian went into the bathroom for private ablutions and the glass eye he took out to wash slipped through his fingers and rolled into the toilet stall. The first thing anyone heard was the unlockable bathroom door swinging open with unusual force. Then the surge of limbs pumping and a sense of their pluming wake as the panicked one-eyed man charged fast to the nurses’ station, holding the eye aloft between two fingers like a bon bon.
Excuse me. This requires antiseptic rinse. Excuse me, said the Russian.
Stephen was watching from where he always stood, near the nurses, flush against the wall.
The nurse made a gesture at the man with her chin, up and out and then back down to her phone call, to register the red fleshy backdrop where an eye should have been, the surprisingly large white globe and glassy brown iris pointed her way.
A short story by Mary Byrne.
Animal Nightlife
It immediately immerses the reader in a world of magical realism, layered language and music. We meet Ravi, Sean, and Vikram, three childhood friends from South London whose shared history binds them through deep loyalty and strong, albeit typical male-friendship kind of affection. They flock together like birds of a feather, quite literally, because one of the curious secrets they share is that all of them possess wings.
Elte Rauch reviews Animal Nightlife by Koushik Banerjea.
A Trip to Ripple
In the early evening we decided to head to Ripple itself for something to eat. I wore a shirt from Boden so as to blend in with the locals, then wondered if I was too smart; I shouldn’t have attempted the first nor worried about the second. We walked down a single-tracked lane between high hedgerows and trees, past a small complex of renovated red-brick outbuildings called The Granary and The Stables. On the B road was a short row of new builds and the village pub. The pub was called The Railway. The front room was full of boomers in trousers in every shade of red, and as we entered we were given the once/twice-over. The people behind the bar were as friendly as it’s possible to be without giving off so much as a joule of warmth. We had prawn cocktail, squid rings, steak and a burger.
By Charlie Hill.
Police, Punk, and Crosswords: An Interview with Tony White
I think that’s a reality of policing. Not just undercover policing. The job requires a kind of professional mask, a professional, and procedural carapace that an experienced police officer will adjust according to the situation. They’re well trained in such procedures. And I wanted to reflect on that kind of life. To come back to Javier Cercas’ idea of the ‘blind spot’ briefly, undercover police, whatever they were doing, were putting themselves in positions of extreme risk: risk of discovery, violence, and in some cases, risk of death. And they were also breaking the law. But they were doing these terrible things and putting themselves at risk because – in their eyes – they were the good guys. Rex, I’m sure, would think of himself as one of the good guys. But the evidence doesn’t bear that up, you know?
Tony White interviewed about his new novel, Phantom at the Feast, by James Riley.
Drug and Prison Stories: An Interview with William S. Hayes
It was in prison that I began to write regularly and it was often smut. Penthouse Forum type shit. After doing time in numerous facilities, and getting clean, I began to think about writing more. Two friends had written books — American Junkie by Tom Hansen and American Demon by Jack Grisham — and after reading them I knew it was time. I began posting little pieces on social media and my friends told me to write it down before I forgot it. So I did. I was working graveyard and put it down on four notebooks — pen to paper. I’ve always loved drug and prison stories and I knew with my experiences I had plenty of material.
William S. Hayes interviewed by John Wisniewski.
There Are Further Zones
The scar and its synthetic monofilament sutures served as the blueprint for an impossible metropolis, its keloid ridges rising into serrated spires that defied human geometry. Under his fingertips, the skin pulsed with a cold, metallic autonomy, suggesting a labyrinthine city designed by a malign intelligence – or a hydrocephalic child – to house the anxieties colonising his adhesiolytic abdomen. He sensed the surgery as a structural intrusion – the implantation of a sightless, erotic citadel within the interstitial tissue of his core. He imagined the sutures tightening – tension cables, anchoring this parasitic architecture deep into his viscera, preparing his frame to serve as the shuddering host for a future anatomy that he could no longer recognise as his own.
By Steve Finbow.
Joanna Rosenfeld – The Resonant Void – George Berger Column
I want to start by saying something that will make you read the rest of this column, so let me say this:
Joanna Rosenfeld is the most intense, brave and astonishing performer I’ve seen on a stage in the last 30 years, maybe longer. In any discipline, on any level.
By George Berger.
The Jaguar’s Roar: Introduction
For [Micheliny] Verunschk, the images in the São Paulo exhibition became an obsession. ‘The figures were very familiar to me,’ she said in a 2021 interview, ‘but finding them there, in the original, their faces looking at me, it was disturbing.’ She visited the exhibition countless times over several years, trying to understand the nature of this disturbance, its origin. As a trained historian, she said, her first impulse was to conduct research, to dig for whatever information might be available about the children. But she’s also a poet and a novelist. Not finding much recorded about the two, she began to write their story, weaving together the fictional and the archival to shape one version – her version – of what might have been.
Read the introduction to The Jaguar’s Roar (Dead Ink, 2026) by Juliana Barbassa, who translated the novel.
Petite Artillery
I am a dog.
I am rabid.
I bark, I howl, I bare my fangs.
Spit drips from my mouth.
I feel my anger boiling in black froth toward every living thing.
As I run, I smell the fear and dread of people.
One girl’s scent draws me in.
I sink my teeth into her soft, welcoming thigh.
A short story by Greta Kaluževičiūtė.
Minute 9: U.S. Go Home
Alain is all awkward points – a rangy frame on clothes hanger shoulders. He’s got a squint like Eastwood’s but isn’t handsome with it. Even as the verse amps up, in this moment of ostensible release, his arms pivot around a locked torso, as if this room were a cell barely large enough to contain him. And it’s here, in this cell, in this body, that Alain claims his authority over the forces that still linger in his country. Late in the film, he will refuse a friendly gesture from Capt. Brown (Vincent Gallo) with “I’m Communist. I don’t drink Coca-Cola.”
Michael Ewins on U. S. Go Home by Claire Denis.
The Musket Ball
The musket ball.
The museumgoer stares at it, a dull but once deadly sphere sitting stately and harmless in a glass case. A Rust Belt museum housed in a former Gilded Age tycoon’s manor. The exhibit is about instruments of war. The evolution of war. The musket ball. Its texture compelling. The surface of the moon, its myths and mysteries.
The museumgoer stares.
A short story by Kent Kosack.
The Meta-ropolitan Police – Clues, Codes, and the Algorithmic Infosphere
The past haunts the book, the London of Chris Petit’s Robinson or the multi-layered, mythic ruins of Michael Moorcock’s Mother London, or the time-shifting echoes of Iain Sinclair’s White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings. Phantom at the Feast – like London – is built on top of its own ghosts – The Fountain in the Forest. Every alleyway, every sentence, is an archive of financial fraud, human trafficking, pornography, and the mappings of storyline in the previous novel. Every brick in the city, every word on the page, retains the vibration of the past, one can still hear The Clash’s 1985 busking tour – a ragged, acoustic ghost trailing through the concrete poured over the corpse of punk.
Steve Finbow reviews Phantom at the Feast by Tony White.
