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Sophie Mackintosh
Sophie Mackintosh's fiction has appeared in Granta and The Stinging Fly, among others. She was the winner of the 2016 White Review Short Story Prize and the Virago X Stylist short story prize. Her debut novel, The Water Cure, is published by Hamish Hamilton in the UK and forthcoming from Doubleday in the US.

Articles Available Online


Lena Andersson's ‘Acts of Infidelity’

Book Review

July 2018

Sophie Mackintosh

Book Review

July 2018

Acts of Infidelity is the second novel by Lena Andersson that follows unlucky-in-love heroine Ester Nilsson, and it’s another scalpel-sharp look at a doomed...

Fiction

May 2018

Self-Improvement

Sophie Mackintosh

Fiction

May 2018

I had been sent back from the city in disgrace, back to my parents’ house in the country. It...

There are two categories in the literary system I’d like to celebrate at high speed: the lonely writer, and the magazine And before we celebrate one writer in particular, I want to perform a mini pause and consider that second category, the magazine, the category of which The White Review forms such an elegant example I guess I think that the fact that such a magazine exists is one proof that literature might still be possible in this distracted era For the lonely writer needs the magazine, very much – the magazine and its lonely editors Because, speaking as one such melancholy novelist, it has to be admitted that, given the amount of pre-existing stories and myths and objects and products in this world, it’s basically crazy to want to add to this giant heap The wish to do so is a small conundrum of vanity And one possible instrument for the solving of this conundrum is an editor Laziness, after all, is natural Moral murkiness, stylistic self-satisfaction, lack of sense of humour: these are the usual modes of the writer alone with her computer screen To avoid such things it’s therefore useful and dispiriting, usefully dispiriting, to have in your head the presence of an acerbic and disappointed editor, as a totem of that other absent presence, the disappointed reader   But while it’s true that if I think of a quick list of magazines I love from the last century or so – beginning with The White Review’s ghost, La Revue Blanche, then moving on through T S Eliot’s Criterion, Georges Bataille’s Documents, Marguerite Caetani’s Botteghe Oscure, Cahiers du cinéma, Phyllis Johnson’s Aspen, The Paris Review – they’re sometimes associated with particular editors, just as also they might be associated with a specific group, and even a specific manifesto, I’m not sure in the end if editors or groups or manifestoes are precisely why magazines are so important The real machinery of a magazine is how it converts the solitary act of writing into something social It gathers writers together, as in some allegorical apartment block It makes visible works and

Contributor

April 2016

Sophie Mackintosh

Contributor

April 2016

Sophie Mackintosh’s fiction has appeared in Granta and The Stinging Fly, among others. She was the winner of the...

Grace

Prize Entry

Issue No. 17

Sophie Mackintosh

Prize Entry

Issue No. 17

14. It comes for me in the middle of the day when I am preparing lunch, quartering a tomato then slicing each segment in...

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fiction

Issue No. 8

Estate

China Miéville

fiction

Issue No. 8

Two nights running I woke up with my heart going crazy. The first time, as I lay there in...

poetry

September 2012

Mainline Rail

Eleanor Rees

poetry

September 2012

Back-to-backs, some of the last, and always just below the view   a sunken tide of regular sound west...

poetry

May 2011

Two Prose Poems From 'The Sacrifice of Abraham'

Alexander Nemser

poetry

May 2011

The Rabbis   As the purple light of evening descended, women sang blessings over silver candelabra, and a group...

 

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