A new voice in digital publishing
Prachi Pati *CONTENT WARNING: DEATH, XENOPHOBIA, SOME TORTURE AND GORE, MURDER.* Isn't it great when you discover a book that is under hyped or was never on your radar and you just happened to stumble upon it and it made you really happy? Which is one such book you stumbled upon recently and loved and [...]
Zoë Wells Ryan Dennis is a former Fulbright Scholar in Creative writing, and has taught at several universities. He recently completed a PhD at the National University of Ireland, Galway. His work has been published in a number of journals, including the Cimarron Review, The Threepenny Review, and Fusion. He is also a syndicated columnist [...]
Zoe Wells The old man and the young boy, struggling to make their way through an unforgiving environment. It’s a story you’ve heard before, likely read and enjoyed before, but in Ryan Dennis’s debut, The Beasts They Turned Away, everything familiar is made eerily different. The novel follows Iosac Mulgannon, a farmer, who is taking [...]
Our team of international volunteers describe what they find engrossing, and disappointing about their choice of novels, poetry and memoirs.
Chiara Pistillo *CONTENT WARNING: MENTAL HEALTH ISSUES, INCLUDING SUICIDE* Many of us will probably describe ourselves as progressive, modern, even woke, but we all have our taboos, and schizophrenia and mental health are most certainly some of them. If you have indeed at any point thought that mental health issues are not a serious matter [...]
Michael A. Arnold Most people have thought about the future - these days it makes sense to fear it. Other than nuclear weapons, the major threat to our continued survival is climate change. This is another, metaphorical, bomb that could explode and make our planet uninhabitable. The book The Uninhabitable Earth: A Story of the [...]
For a brief period, it seemed my parents’ marriage might survive my dad’s fling with the Yugoslavian manicurist from the salon above his shop.
Photo by Des Récits on Unsplash I’m alright, thanks – although now you ask I do feel a bit,you know,skinned –like the last layertougher than the reststretched tight over my drumhas ripped – and out comeall the things I can’t sayunseen thingsthat can’t find the words to fit themshapeshifters –I can’t pin down in any [...]
Vita is caught up unexpectedly by EM Forster, who encompasses Vita and her attention halfway through a sentence. And then she is laughing, charming, taking the floor, immediately the highlight of the evening, her being, in short, (what Virginia had never been) a real woman. Virginia is left to push her wine glass half an inch further away, leaving a half-moon of condensation on the table, a puddle reflecting the fluttering caprices of the fire’s waxes and wanes.
The bushy eyebrows flexed and the great toucan-like nose, having been tickled by a wandering moustache hair, wrinkled as Gherardo looked around the town square as the prospering sun slowly peeled back the early morning’s inactivity. The townspeople emerged from their shaded domains and into its ceaseless glare as they went about their daily routines. He peered through the golden rays of sunlight that had crept around the sides of the crumbling buildings and blessed the cobblestones with its amber gaze.
