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.

Issue #265

• Devotion to the cut. >>Gertrude Stein: An afterlife.

• Not everyone got the joke. >>Gertrude Stein: An afterlife.

• Brilliantly human. >>Read them all!

• Both dangerous and dreamy. >>Kings of this World.

• Not necessarily romantic. >>The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny.

• More than a minute. >>>>The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny.

• Memory and oblivion. >>I Gave You Eyes and You Looked toward Darkness.

• ”The tide carries my books from my head.” >>I Gave You Eyes and You Looked toward Darkness.

• Radical hope. >>No Straight Road Takes You There.

• What to make of the mother who made you. >>Mother Mary Comes to Me.

• A fugitive childhood. >>Mother Mary Comes to Me.

• The darkened house. >>The Threshold and the Ledger.

• I has become we. >>The Threshold and the Ledger.

• Story sovereignty. >>Books of Mana.

• The effect of words. >>Misinterpretation.

• Singing on the page. >>Seascraper.

• Not lost in a moment. >>How to Save Democracy in Aotearoa New Zealand.

• A roadmap for renewal. >>How to Save Democracy in Aotearoa New Zealand.

• Evolving scholarship. >>The Welcome of Strangers.

• A good man. >>Pastoral Care.

• Dominant terms. >>Mad World.

• Treated as such. >>Is a River Alive?

• Language conceals reality.

• The diva mode of translation.

• A different life. >>Cello: A journey through silence to sound.

• Computers that want things.

• Trampling.

• You mustn’t pretend you didn’t know.

• Our film recommendation this week: I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing.

• The Thirty Most Disappointing Under Thirty.

Issue #264

• A river underneath her life. >>Alphabetical Diaries.

• Every scene and itch. >>The City Changes Its Face.

• Wanting to act. >>The City Changes Its Face.

• What she wanted she got. >>Creation Lake.

• Tearing up the rule book. >>Grief Is the Thing with Feathers.

• Becoming strangers. >>One Day, Everyone Will Always Have Been Against This.

• Infinite wibble. >>What Art Does.

• Not messages but stories. >>To the Moon.

• There in Telemark. >>The Ice Palace. >>The Birds.

• The long and the short of Israel and Palestine. >>Books by Ilan Pappe. >>Books by Avi Shlaim.

• How to read like a Booker Prize judge.

• The paradoxes at the limits of language.

• Calvino and the machines. >>Books by Italo Calvino.

• The threat of arrest. >>Books by Sally Rooney.

• Seeing the world. >>Where to?

• Anxious letters. >>Letters to Felice.

• The Unconscious is like a Large Language Model.

• A mobile library and a mobile librarian.

• Our film recommendation this week: Bill Direen, A Memory of Others. >>Stream Light.

• An incredible journey.

Issue #263

• Ake! Ake! Ake!

• Always somewhere else. >>Terrier, Worrier.

• Echoes in the dome. >>Wildcat Dome.

• Democracy under pressure. >>How to Save Democracy.

• Tea, scones, and justice. >>Hope and Hardship.

• Brave new words. >>Gliff.

• Hei whakanui. >>Poto.

• What we choose to remember. >>Forgotten.

• “My child has gone into the next moment.” >>Paper Crown.

• Radioactive toothpaste. >>Children of Radium.

• Boxing as research. >>Rough Trade.

• A warning. >>I Who Have Never Known Men.

• Your stories are your own. >>Books by James Kelman.

• Deceptively small things. >>Do Dogs Have Chins?

• The Smoker. >>Books by Ottessa Moshfegh.

• The refusal to look away. >>The Trees.

• Joy, full and fearless. >>Some favourites by Joy Cowley.

• Burning age of rage. >>Dread, Beat an’ Blood. >>Books by Linton Kwesi Johnson.

• On the conservatism of contemporary literary fiction.

• Māori wards work. >>Decide together.

• Hurrah for Spoor Books! >>Independent, curious and radical publishing.

• The language of silence.

• Know what you’re looking at.

• See monsters.

• The cult of the wild.

• The mystery of the cat mystery.

• Everything is intertwined. >>Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead.

• Our watching recommendation this week: The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. >>Read the book!

• The cat’s Maew.

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.