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Leon Craig
Leon Craig is a writer and editor based in Berlin. She has written for the TLS, the Literary ReviewAnother Gaze and the London Magazine among others. Her queer gothic short story collection Parallel Hells is published by Sceptre Books and she is currently working on her first novel The Decadence.

Articles Available Online


Cosy Violence

Book Review

June 2023

Leon Craig

Book Review

June 2023

The 22 year old Australian narrator of K Patrick’s sensuous, subversive debut novel is a long way from home. A matron at an unnamed...

Fiction

September 2021

Lick the Dust

Leon Craig

Fiction

September 2021

When you misplace something in the library here, it stays lost for a very long time. The eighteenth-century catalogue...

Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle has an oddly medieval form: a cycle, composed of six auto-biographical books about the Norwegian author’s life The project was born of abandon, as he has it: ‘I was looking for something and at the end I was so frustrated I thought I would just write it as it was, no tricks, no nothing… I just wanted to tell a story, which is the story of my life, basically [sic]’   There’s a shrug of false modesty here Some way into the enterprise he must have envisioned a work of literary greatness taking shape; the hints lie in the colossal scale of the work, its dark and knowing title, the decision to call the volumes novels Yet, on a structural and stylistic level, the fed-up beginnings and pared-down motives reflect the true character of the writing In his magnum opus, Knausgaard has dispensed with most of the narrative conventions inscribed in realist fiction – no plot, no genre, no varnish At first, the books read as exercises in self-scrutiny without aesthetic agenda, an uncut abundance of descriptive detail, where the absence of any clear hierarchy of interest makes for peculiarly flat prose   A passage on smuggling out beer for a New Year’s Eve party when a teenager is as vividly evoked as falling in love as an adult It’s a weird effect, disappointing for those who crave the relief of a fictive superstructure, but it gives the reader a sense of living at the level of first-hand experience, where the longing for a drink can be as strong to a boy as feelings for his wife are to a man Life is, of course, flatter than fiction makes it, without recourse to the teleological depth of a plot or the broader understanding of an omniscient narrator But it’s also closer to the written word than the more aloof products of postmodern experiment would lead you to believe Knausgaard’s achievement is not so much to tell the truth about his life, but to write it in a way that reflects that honesty, a veracious style, if you will

Contributor

April 2016

Leon Craig

Contributor

April 2016

Leon Craig is a writer and editor based in Berlin. She has written for the TLS, the Literary Review, Another Gaze and the London Magazine among...

Art Review

April 2019

Oscar Wilde Temple, Studio Voltaire

Leon Craig

Art Review

April 2019

The light is dim, the air richly scented. Little purple tea lights flicker in the votive candle rack and...

[Getting] Down with Gal Pals

Feature

November 2018

Leon Craig

Feature

November 2018

There’s a moment in Laura Kaye’s underrated novel English Animals when the protagonist Mirka, sitting in the village bar with her married lover, notices...
Mute Canticle

Prize Entry

April 2016

Leon Craig

Prize Entry

April 2016

Giulio the singing fascist came to pick me up from the little airport in his Jeep. He made sure to come round and hold...

READ NEXT

Interview

February 2017

Interview with Hajra Waheed

Rebecca Travis

Interview

February 2017

This conversation with Hajra Waheed began in person with an opportune meeting at her Montreal studio in April 2016....

poetry

July 2015

About Blue: Velestovo

Tatiana Daniliyants

TR. Katherine E. Young

poetry

July 2015

About Blue: Velestovo   1   …when I say the name: Velestovo, I think of deep blue. Of blue...

Art

November 2012

7 1/2 mile hike to Mohonk Lake via Duck Pond

Patricia Niven

JA Murrin

Art

November 2012

Notes on a Walk Never Taken by JA Murrin   As a writer I like to visit the places...

 

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