The White Review

[Featured Article]

The Cherry Tree

Sheila Heti

That winter, all the plums froze. All the peaches froze and all the cherries froze, and everything froze so there were no fruits in the spring. The villagers, the farmers, tried to revive the fruits; they put them in the warm and shallow part of the lake, but these fruits disintegrated and their skins floated away. Others tried to leave the fruits in the sun, but these fruits dried up and rotted. One woman took some fruits and slept with them in her bed, but she rolled over in the night and squished them. Another woman who had a chicken farm put the fruits under the                                                                                     

feathers of her hens, but the hens pecked the fruits in the night, and the fruits were ruined in this way. No one could save the fruits, and the whole village was very distressed that this would be a summer without fruit.   A pious man went into the temple one night to ask the Gods why they had killed the village's crops, so that no fruits could grow, so that they were fated to be unhappy in this way, and the Gods said, 'When you planted the fruits, you planted them without care, just throwing the seeds in the soil. Last year you planted the... [Click to read more]

Jean Genet in Spain
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Jean Genet in Spain
Juan Goytisolo, trans. Peter Bush

After his descent into abjection, Genet decides to embrace his condition and transform it into a supreme virtue. He rejects the hierarchy of values of a self-righteous society and turns it on its head: transmutes what is base into something noble and what is noble into something base. The process of inner subversion he initiated in Barcelona’s barrio chino will be long and haphazard, and finds expression over the n... [Click to read more]

Interview with Lars Iyer
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Interview with Lars Iyer
David Morris

Music is much more important to me than literature, literary writing. And if a literary work does not have a kind of music in its prose, I put it down straight away. Rhythm in prose is a vital concern to me. The inner movement of the text, the way it sounds, and the way the sounds of words and sentences combine with others. Without this vividness of movement, prose is inert. A precise choice of words, a distinctive ... [Click to read more]

Franz Von Stuck, Adam and Eve
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NEOLOGISM: How words do things with...
Maryam Monalisa Gharavi

The impulse to invent new words out of preexisting elements is a latent feature of language. A neologism (from Greek néo-, meaning ‘new’ and logos, meaning ‘speech, utterance’) is a blend of existing fragments to forge anew. I picture it as grafting inorganic matter to the organic. If it sticks, the inorganic is fused to, and almost imperceptible from, the organic. Should you tear your anterior cruciate li... [Click to read more]

Man Ray, 'Distorsion'
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Ghosts and Relics: The Haunting Avant...
John Douglas Millar

For many on the melancholic wing of the cultural Left, the historic avant-garde remains an admonishing, accusatory phantom. As an apparently lost moment in which art bound itself to the burning wheel of a revolutionary politics, it is seen to reflect a harsh light on the vulgar, commodified, institutionalised, globalised, faux-outrageous, faux-politicised art world we find ourselves operating in today. And yet, as wi... [Click to read more]

Belly by Melissa Lee-Houghton
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Belly
Melissa Lee-Houghton

When I was fifteen I took my two little cousins into townand had them wait outside the tattoo parlourwhile a woman with blue hair pierced my belly buttonwith a big red ruby that pooled inside like a roving eye.They were crying when I emerged. I washardly able to breathe for fear of the pain.On the way home on the bus, Amy sang Karma Chameleonand Simone looked out of the window at time passingas though watching life b... [Click to read more]

2_2
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What We Did After We Lost 100 Years'...
Agri Ismaïl

‘World finance had, in 2008, a near-death experience.’ The words belong to a partner of a renowned international law firm. The partner was standing at the podium, looking over a sea of bearded faces within which bobbed a scattering of men and women without any facial hair, some of whom (those from firms that were days away from collapsing) were jotting down every word as if the speech were a newly unearthed Gospe... [Click to read more]

Major Organs by Melissa Lee-Houghton
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Major Organs
Melissa Lee-Houghton

When they take my brain out of its casingit will be fluorescentand the mortuary assistant will have to stand backbecause it will dazzle so brightly–it will be heavier than a watermelonand shot with gold. I want them to remove everything.I want to be an empty shell.They won’t be able to give my lungs awayand my heart won’t be strong enough to get someone throughthe next decadebut I want to be packed with gauzea... [Click to read more]

Vanessa Hogkinson, 'You're Just A Headline (C, Y)' (2012)
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Techno-primitivism
Vanessa Hodgkinson and David Trotter

What follows could have been an essay or an interview. In the event, it resembles the one as little as it resembles the other. The images are nearly all by Vanessa Hodgkinson. David Trotter supplied most of the words. This is the story of a critic’s encounter with work by an artist who had encountered some of his ideas. Although the artist the story describes is an artist and the critic a critic, it’s not always... [Click to read more]

Interview with Darian Leader
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Interview with Darian Leader
Kishani Widyaratna

A practicing Lacanian psychoanalyst, Darian Leader is one of a dying breed. It is no overstatement to say that psychoanalysis is not only out of fashion and widely scorned but largely dismissed as an outdated discipline borne of a personality cult; Leader himself has described analysts today as ‘mutants scavenging after a nuclear holocaust’. What makes his position rarer still is that he is also a celebrated aut... [Click to read more]

Still from The White Ribbon by Michael Haneke
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Haneke's Lessons
R. D'Ambrose

‘Art is there to have a stimulating effect, if it earns its name. You have to be honest, that's the only thing.’—Michael Haneke, in an interview   The voice, now over 70, is usually candid, bumptious; the statements – zealous, with the pang and the patina of a reproach – typically fixed at the high pitch of imperiousness. A choice remark: ‘Why do I rape the viewer? I try to rape him into being refl... [Click to read more]

Contributors to the Current Issue

Mai-Thu Perret, Edouard Levé, Jan Steyn, Luc Tuymans, Mr Guardianista, Jesse Loncraine, Yves Bonnefoy, Berverley Bie Brahic, Jennifer Hodgson, Patricia Waugh, Talia Chetrit, Peter Stamm, Michael Hofmann, Keston Sutherland, Natalie Ferris, Oli Hazzard, Joe Luna, Lawrence Lek, John Stezaker, Alice Hattrick, James Wilkes

The Editors

Benjamin Eastham is a freelance editor, writer and curator. He also works at Hannah Barry Gallery, London.
Jacques Testard is a freelance editor, writer and translator. In the past he has worked at The Sunday Times, the Paris Review, and Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

News & Events

  1. Pyramid Schemes Book Now Available To Buy
  2. Pyramid Schemes: A Collaborative Exhibition on 2 May
  3. The White Review Short Story Prize Party: Thursday 25 April
  4. The White Review No. 7 Launch with John Stezaker at Claire de Rouen Books (28 March 2013)
  5. The White Review at Foyles on 24 January

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