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David Isaacs
David Isaacs has recently completed a PhD about the ethics of rewriting at UCL. He is coming to the end of a first novel and is at the early stages of a new project about the present tense.


Articles Available Online


Interview with Namwali Serpell

Interview

December 2020

David Isaacs

Interview

December 2020

Namwali Serpell is a rarity: an academic and novelist whose criticism is as vital as her fiction. Since we first spoke, in September 2020,...

Book Review

June 2018

Christine Schutt’s ‘Pure Hollywood’

David Isaacs

Book Review

June 2018

There is a certain kind of American novelist of the late twentieth century whose fiction fetishises plant names. The...

Several months ago, I went to a salon so small and so identikit that I do not recall the name, and against every sane friend’s advice, had my real fingernails drilled down to nothing for the sake of having longer, obviously artificial nails installed The effect was simultaneously intoxicating, and impractical I re-learned how to type; relied, reluctantly, on male help in the workplace and at home to perform mundane tasks like opening cans and buttoning blouses I did not remember ever thinking that my hands had looked more beautiful, less like my hands They were like a celebrity’s; an artwork After two months, unable to afford maintenance, I had the nails removed Cut necessarily down to the quick, my fingernails now made my fingers look like toes, artless and blunt I could no longer regard my hands and think, as one is meant to after leaving an appointment at a salon, that I did not fully recognise them There was no distance, no transformation   Nail salons and hairdressers specialise in modifying the literally live-dead parts of human bodies; those that grow after we die, but do not bleed if cut More often than not, the live-dead parts being modified belong to women, who are not unused to being seen as an admixture of desirable-or-undesirable bodily fragments, rather than as whole This is especially true for famous women, whose live and live-dead parts are familiar enough to us, after such long exposure, to behave like semaphore; to signify a thing beside themselves In a promotional release for Live Dead World, a new show by the artist Gabriele Beveridge, an image appeared on Seventeen Gallery’s website Folded over on each other, pages from women’s high-fashion magazines – fluid and smooth, held in place by two or three rubber bands – made an abstract, feminine composite out of girl-eyes, girl-lips, and faded, indistinct girl-faces There, located front and centre, was Britney Spears’s mouth, a logo as distinctive as a Coca Cola bottle It is peculiar, and a little eerie, that although it’s possible I may not recognise my own mouth in a

Contributor

August 2014

David Isaacs

Contributor

August 2014

David Isaacs has recently completed a PhD about the ethics of rewriting at UCL. He is coming to the end...

Prize Entry

April 2017

Pylons

David Isaacs

Prize Entry

April 2017

Once upon a time, Dad would begin, I think, focusing on the road, there was a man called Watt....

Seasickness

Prize Entry

April 2016

David Isaacs

Prize Entry

April 2016

‘How would you begin?’   She puts a finger to her lips, a little wrinkled still from the water, and hesitates. She says, ‘Maybe:...
How things are falling.

Prize Entry

April 2015

David Isaacs

Prize Entry

April 2015

i.   Oyster cards were first issued to members of the British public in July 2003; by June 2015 they will have been replaced...
by Accident

fiction

April 2014

David Isaacs

fiction

April 2014

[To be read aloud]   I want to begin – and I hope I don’t come across as autistic or anything like that (and...

READ NEXT

feature

March 2016

Behind the Yellow Curtain

Annina Lehmann

feature

March 2016

Notes from a workshop   At first, there is nothing but a yellow curtain at the back of the...

poetry

May 2016

Two Poems

Sam Buchan-Watts

poetry

May 2016

The Dentist’s Chair       I dreamt of the dentist’s chair, that it wore a smart pair of...

poetry

March 2013

The Humming Lady

James Byrne

poetry

March 2013

The humming lady arrives in a smiling orange smock and orders from the waiter a plate of overripe oranges,...

 

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